The doubtful grant of Ireland

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT

OF

BY POPE ADRIAN IV. TO KING HENRY //.
INVESTIGATED

BY

LAURENCE GINNELL

OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LA.W
AUTHOR OF "THH BRKHON LAWS," ETC.

Reprinted, with slight revision and re-arrangement, from the
"NEW IRELAND REVIEW"

2>ublin
FALL ON & CO.

29 LOWER SACKVILLE STREET
1899

APR -5 1974

PKINTED BY

SEALY, BEYERS AND WALKKR,

MIDDLE AHHEY ST.,

DUBLIN'.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PA(iK

I. A GENERAL VIEW OF THE GROUND, WITH TEXT OF

THE DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED 1

II. JOHN OF SALISBURY, AND THE EVIDENCE ATTRIBUTED

TO HIM ... ... ... 21

III. CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS ... 49

IV. WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS ... ... 71

V. FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THK PRINCIPAL INSTRU-
MENT ... ... ... ... 101

VI. THE OTHER INSTRUMENTS CONSIDERED. ALL FOUND

TO BE SPURIOUS ... ... ... 130

INDEX 159

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT

OF

IRELAND.

CHAPTER I.

A General View of the Ground, with Text of the
Documents to be Examined.

THE charge frequently made that we do not take such
interest in our country's history as we ought to do is too
true. But it is not universally true. Certain incidents
of that history have an irresistible attraction for us. If
we except sacred subjects, there is probably no other in-
stance in which the rank and file of a race take to-day
such a lively interest in letters written in the twelfth
century as the Irish race all over the world take in the
documents we are about to consider.

A Bull is a Papal letter, taking its name from the
bubble-shaped, leaden seal which it bears. The letters here
in question are five in number, written in the twelfth cen-
tury, and relating to Ireland. They were probably never
sealed with any seal, and are, therefore, not correctly
called Bulls, even if genuine ; but that name has become
so well known in connection with them that the use of it
cannot be misunderstood. In the twelfth century they
were called privUegia or privileges.

According to the strict rules of evidence, documents are

2 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

inadmissible until their authenticity is first established.
The question of the authenticity of these letters is pro-
perly one for historical investigation rather than for
argument. Research has so far failed to* find their
originals, or conclusive proof that originals legitimate
and authentic ever existed. But a prima facie case for
their authenticity having been otherwise made out, and
being corroborated by their close resemblance to genuine
Papal letters, while at the same time there is in them
sufficient divergence from the unquestioned article to
excite suspicion, and in the circumstances sufficient to
support that suspicion, the question of their authenticity
becomes a subject for discussion.

Light has to be sought from the alleged copies of the
alleged instruments, from the bearers of those alleged
copies and their contemporaries, from the characters of
all the persons concerned, and from the general circum-
stances of the period. A field of considerable scope is
thus opened up, and the facts and inferences gleaned
therefrom vary with the taste and skill of the gleaners.
There may be some who form their opinions first, and
investigate afterwards. But when the facts are as well
known as they can now be, and conscientiously examined,
there is enough in them to occasion the greatest uncer-
tainty ; so that one may well be found on either side of
this controversy without becoming obnoxious to the
charge of mere wilful perversity. And although the
result of historical research within the present century
has somewhat contracted the scope of the controversy by
rendering some of the old positions occupied on both
sides no longer tenable, the same research seems to have
counterbalanced this by furnishing both sides with new
and effective arguments. Some of the evidence on both
sides will, at first sight, appear frail, feeble, and scarcely
relevant. But if it were gross, palpable and conclusive
either way there would no longer be room for argument.

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. O

On slight evidence and fine distinctions some of the most
important political and business transactions in the world
are carried on ; on these the fate of a nation occasionally
depends ; even the most sacred truths of religion, with all
they have effected in this world, and all that depends on
them in the next, hang by a very slender thread, as does
human life itself. We must not disdain or break the
filmy threads, but carefully endeavour to disentangle
them. Nor must we expect Englishmen, however impar-
tial, to investigate and settle for us this question, affecting
as it does the relations between the two countries. We
shall notice an occasion on which they evaded that task
in circumstances in which they could not have shirked it
without risk of reputation had the letters related to
England.

In Ireland we find the authenticity of the letters recog-
nised in the seventeenth century by James Ussher, Protes-
tant Archbishop of Armagh ; Peter Lombard, Catholic
Archbishop of Armagh; and David Rothe, Bishop of
Ossory; and in the present century by the ecclesiastical
historian, Dr. Lanigan, the Editor of the Macarice
Excidium, the Editor of Cambrensis Eversus, and the Yery
Rev. Sylvester Malone, D.D., Yicar-General of Killaloe,
writing in the Dublin Review for April, 1884, and in the
Irish Ecclesiastical Record for October, 1891. This latter
gentleman, now the ablest and most strenuous upholder of
all the letters in question, has written more recently on
the same side, but has been obliged to abandon most of
his earlier positions without securing any new position.
Against their authenticity, we must notice the entire
absence of written Gaelic recognition ; their repudiation
in the seventeenth century by Stephen White, S.J., and
by the author of Cambrensis Eversus ; their repudiation in
the present century by Cardinal Moran in the Irish
Ecclesiastical Record for November, 1872, and by Rev. W.
B. Morris in his book, Ireland and St. Patrick. The learn-

4 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

ing and respectability of all the foregoing authorities are
admitted.

Many others have written on either side of the controversy,
but apparently without having gone to the sources for
information, since they make statements either without
references or with references which lead to nothing relevant,
and even give some references which, when tested, are found
to be incorrect. The primary object of some of them at least
being not the elucidation of what is admittedly obscure, but
the furtherance of current religious or political controversy,
they adopt a particular view at the outset. This they are
determined not to relinquish. By a process of rejecting
rigid facts, twisting pliable ones, and inventing some
padding material, they make that preconceived opinion
their final conclusion and obtrude it on the public, mis-
representing the purport of the documents and even
tampering with their text. They then call for the peremp-
tory closure of the controversy. Such controversy, being
wrong in purpose and in method, can have no effect except
a bad one. The question at issue, though small, is not to
be solved by prejudice or predilection, but by diligent
investigation of facts and rational deduction therefrom.
Legitimately treated, it is of no practical importance what-
ever, does not involve either the religion or the politics of
our day, and can be properly discussed only by keeping
quite aloof from these. The question is purely historical.

Agreement as to the facts among the class of people
just mentioned does not secure or connote agreement as to
the inferences. For instance, persons who agree that the
letters are authentic are most sharply divided as to their
significance. Some invoke them with the special object
of bespattering Popes and exposing their venality, corrup-
tion, and ingratitude towards mankind in general, and
towards faithful Ireland in particular ; while others draw
from them proofs that no Pope ever erred even in political
matters, and that Ireland has always been the object of

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 5

the Pope's special paternal care. These two unhistorical
and essentially antagonistic aspirations, originating at the
opposite poles of mistaken piety, may safely be left to
confute each other. By no possibility can both be true.
From another quarter it has been urged that although
neither religion nor morality is involved in the question,
nor the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility, still to assume
the authenticity of these letters would be tantamount to
assuming that the Pope made a shockingly bad choice of
an instrument for reducing Ireland to law and order,
seeing what the character of Henry II. was, and seeing
that the English in the seven hundred years that ,have
elapsed since that time have failed to accomplish the task
assigned them. This objection is at best feeble. Of course
the consequence suggested, even if it were to follow,
should not deter us from endeavouring to find out what is
the truth of the matter. But how that consequence is
obviated none know better than we who know so well that
the object of the English in Ireland has not been the Pope's
object, but usually one diametrically opposite. In any
case it is far better frankly to withdraw such an objection
as this and allow the inquiry to proceed, since it can be
so easily confronted and neutralized by examples in pari
materia. These letters, supposing them to be genuine,
would not have constituted a greater Papal mistake than
was the conferring of the title of Defender of the Faith
upon Henry VIII. of England. Here is an authentic case
of the Pope's choosing a singularly unworthy instrument
for a purpose at least as intimately connected with his
office as was the subject-matter of these letters. And the
subsequent use of this title by English Sovereigns shows,
too, how willing they are to cling to any honour or advan-
tage derived from the Catholic Church, even when they have
ceased to belong to it, and sworn to defend the Protestant.
Their conduct in this respect is prevented from being
ridiculous only by being royal.

O THE DOUBTFUL GRAXT OF IRELAND.

The more closely one studies the two Popes whose letters
are in question the more firmly is he convinced that,
whether they wrote these letters or not, they resembled
most Popes before and since in .desiring to promote what
they considered the best interests of the Irish people. But
like all men dealing with a country with whose circum-
stances they are not personally acquainted, Popes have had
to take their information second-hand, third-hand, or
fourth-hand ; and the intermediaries have not always been
above suspicion. In these circumstances it has been just
as easy for the Pope as for anybody else to err in accepting
for truth the inventions or the coloured and distorted
facts presented to him under the highest guarantee of
veracity. Opinions formed on this basis regarding the
condition of a country and the best means of improving it,
would probably be such as the fictions were specially
designed to generate and foster.

The letter to which most effect has always been attributed
is that under Pope Adrian's name. In Nicholas Break-
speare we find .an excellent illustration of the exaltation
of the meritorious humble, and of the democratic constitu-
tion of the Catholic Church. A man of the humblest birth,
he was, in December, 1154, in recognition of his real
personal worth, made Pope, under the name of Adrian IV.,
and was the only Englishman who ever sat in the chair
of St. Peter. The Very Rev. Dr. Malone says: — "There
does not appear to be in the domain of history a better
authenticated fact than the privilege of Adrian IY. to
Henry II." At all events from it the sovereigns of England
from Henry II. down to Henry VIII. derived the title of
Lord of Ireland which was the only title they used with
reference to Ireland. Henry YIII. was the first English
king who styled himself King of Ireland. The conclusions
arrived at by the best authorities, with regard to the date
at which this letter became known in Ireland, show how
little warrant there is for the use made of it by partizans.

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. I

One writes about the Pope having handed Ireland over to
King Henry II., and is quite sure that this letter was
Henry's most potent weapon in the conquest of Ireland :
another, whose object is different, is not clear about either
the facts or the conclusions, but thinks the letter was
known in Ireland in 1172, or even earlier, ^ow, for neither
of these positions is there a shadow of historical warrant.
On the question of date, most of those who deny the
authenticity of the letters believe that they were first
made known about 1180, while Rev. Dr. Kelly, a warm
supporter of them all, says with regard to Adrian's : "There
is not any, even the slightest, authority for asserting that
it was known in Ireland before that date (1172), nor for
three years later." — Cambrensis Eversus, vol. ii., page 440.
And the only authority for holding that it was made known
in Ireland so early as 1175 is that of Giraldus Cambrensis,
which we propose to examine later on. We may then take
1175 as the earliest date at which any but a blind partizan
has fixed the first reading of any of these letters in Ireland.
Hence, whatever effect they may have had subsequently,
they cannot have influenced the Irish in 1172, being then
unknown ; and for the same reason they cannot have con-
tributed in the slightest degree to Henry's conquest of
Ireland.

These letters might, however, have involved, in the
twelfth century, matters of discipline and obedience ; and
a due examination of them demands some knowledge of
the faith, the Church discipline, the relations between
Church and State, and the general condition of Europe in
the twelfth century, and the international politics of that
time. According to the conception of human life then
current on the Continent, there were scarcely more than
two careers worthy of gentlemen — learning and the sword.
Learning being available only in and through the Church,
men who sought it, with whatever object, were attracted
to her ; and there being then as now plenty of men with

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

brains far in excess of their piety, the Church sometimes
found herself possessed of members, and even of ministers,
who seem to us strangely out of place. In addition to what
we now consider the normal percentage of young men
entering the Church in obedience to vocation or other
worthy motive, another and widely different class joined
the ranks of the clergy. Cousins of the King, younger sons
of the nobility, and other persons conscious of .talent or
ambition or both, entered the Church deliberately as the
surest road for preferment, whether ecclesiastical or civil,
without any intention of engaging in missionary or
parochial drudgery, but with the fixed purpose of belong-
ing from the outset to the Higher Clergy, who had access
to the King's Court. While some of these men remained
courtiers all their lives, idle or ill-employed, others, as a
natural consequence of their superior culture, from
ministers of God, became ministers of the State, lawyers,
judges, politicians, secretaries, diplomatists, statesmen, and
even soldiers, and the highest civil secular offices were
usually filled by them. Royal favourites and connections,
frequently mere striplings in their teens, perhaps not in
Orders at all, perhaps favoured with Minor Orders ad hoc,
were appointed to nominal ecclesiastical offices to which
the largest revenues were attached, but of which humble
and unknown men discharged the real duties. The rich
offices -were honorary in the inverted sense that their oc-
cupants drew the salaries but neglected the duties. In
such circumstances, occasional scandals and the presence
of odd characters in the sanctuary were phenomena to be
expected, and it must in justice be said that they were by
no means as numerous as might have been expected. The
men of those days were neither all bad nor any of them
wholly bad. And as regards those who were really in
Holy Orders, it would be easy to name some who, although
promoted to high positions in the Church for manifest
political reasons, became exemplary occupants of the offices

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 9

to which they were so raised, effected disciplinary and
other improvements which men more holy if less energetic
would have found it impossible to effect, became able and
zealous churchmen, and sadly disappointed those who had
expected to find them pliant tools.

It was a strange and contradictory age, moved by two
strong currents ; by one towards a higher civilization, by
the other back towards barbarism ; and sons of the same
father are known to have been impelled in those different
directions. Some were warmed by the fervour of piety,
others by the fervour of wickedness ; some by the love of
military renown, others by the love of lucre or worse. It
was an age of efflorescent Christian chivalry,. as exemplified
in the Crusades, of general religious unity among Chris-
tians, and yet an age of antipopes and local scandals ; an
age when almost every country in Europe produced, in
the same generation, its highest specimen of human per-
fection and its lowest of human depravity. But, when
reading of past ages we are prone to expect something
which we do not find in our own, namely, a general
uniformity of human character, a thing that never has
existed, and certainly does not now exist. It is just
possible that from amongst ourselves of the nineteenth
century we could match both the best and the worst of
the twelfth. For, as if to maintain equilibrium with
variety, the great vices of some always draw forth the great
virtues of others. As every season has its fashion, so every
age has its characteristic moving spirit. That which most
filled and moved men's minds in the twelfth century seems
to have been an unbounded and insatiable ambition. Of
all passions this is the most calculated to excite and disturb
high and low, to produce and precipitate complications and
changes which affect everybody, to generate in men quali-
ties which in calmer times would have lain dormant, and
to bring above the surface some who in calmer times
would have remained in lifelong obscurity.

10 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

The political condition of most of the nations of Europe
was still one of unrest after the convulsions attending and
following the disruption of the .Western Empire, and their
general attachment to- the Church, of which the Pope was
the first minister, made them look to him as the prime
guardian of the Christian fold, and the first enemy of all
manner of wrongs and abuses amongst all the nations that
accepted the Christian name. They appealed to him for
comfort and guidance in all sorts of difficulties, public and
private, religious, political, and mixed. Peoples appealed to
him against rulers and rulers against one another. All this
gave rise to relations between the Pope and States far more
numerous and complicated than what are now ordinarily
known as the relations between Church and State.
Although political action now rarely becomes the duty of
the Pope as such, the political condition of a country may
occasionally be a matter of great concern to him. This
was precisely the condition of the whole of Europe in the
twelfth century. The Church was the highest, if not the
only, expression of civilization. The Pope's representatives,
wherever they went, were bearers of a higher learning
and a higher law, as well as of the GospeL The law they
bore was Roman, tempered by Canon Law, which was
recognized (however reluctantly) in most of the countries
of Europe. In virtue, partly of this law, partly of the
condition of things just outlined, and partly of an alleged
donation of Constantine the Great, the Pope became a
political and international arbiter and umpire at the head
of the European States, which, in so far as they were united
through him, formed a sort of loose confederation. For
him they felt or affected respect, to him they paid
deference ; and, in spite of the occasional schisms and dis-
orders alluded to, the Pope was powerful with a subtle
power, which all recognised, and against which tyrants
often chafed. Some of the decretals in the Canon Law seem
open to the construction that two or three of the Popes

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 11

went even beyond this spiritual and moral jurisdiction,
and claimed a temporal suzerainty over Europe if not
over the entire world. But the acknowledged ambition
of all Popes was, as it still is, the apostolic ambition to
extend the Church so widely as to include all men, and,
consequentially, to bring all men to recognise and submit
to the Pope's universal primacy. And even in the cases
of Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) and Urban II. , who are
believed to have extended the temporal power of the
papacy to the utmost limits it has ever reached, neither one
nor the other of them claimed iiniversal temporal sove-
reignty. The largest claims they made are fully accounted
for by local and temporary causes. The Pope's inter-
national position will be found denned in Gosselin's
Pouvoir du Pape au Moyen Age. Of the hero of Canossa,
one of the most learned authorities on events in the Middle
Ages says : — " C'est une exageration que d'attribuer a
Gregoire VII. des reves de monarchic et de domination
universelles ; ce qui le preoccupe, c'est d'affirmer le
caractere absolument cathoUque de 1'Eglise, et d'assurer
la situation international de la papaute." — Lucius Lector,
Le Conclave, page 69.

In these circumstances a considerable amount of business
must have been transacted between the Pope and a Catholic
prince like Henry II., whose dominions extended from the
Cheviot Hills to the Pyrenees. The Pope's power being
invoked in all quarters, and being such that it could not
be successfully resisted by open force, was frequently met
or eluded by fraud. There was a brisk demand for Papal
letters and charters, sometimes for strange purposes. To
meet this demand, clever ambitious men could scarcely
be expected to wait for genuine documents from Rome,
especially if those required were such as the Pope was
not likely to grant. Consequently, some documents of
those times, still existing, are said to be manifest forgeries,
and are preserved not for the confirmation of facts, but

12 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

as antique specimens of misapplied ingenuity. So far as
a comparison can be made it would appear that there were
more frauds and forgeries and dishonest uses made of the
Pope's name in that age than have been in subsequent
times of open Protestantism, because in the latter case
defiance took the place of dissimulation.

The Normans may be taken to have been typical of
their age, and hence to have differed both from British
Islanders of the present day and from the Irish of that
day. Differences led to mistakes on all sides, and the
Normans naturally considering their own the best of every-
thing, may be pardoned for holding as barbarous some
Irish practices different from theirs. To take one instance
out of many, the Norman clergy inculcated the payment
of tithes as a matter of faith, as anyone who consults their
writings may see. To their minds there could be no more
positive proof of the utter absence of Christianity among
a people than the non-payment of tithes. Ireland, on the
other hand, had passed through her golden age of
Christianity without a State Church, and without paying
tithes. Each clan provided amply for its own clergy, but
in a manner scarcely intelligible to persons unacquainted
with the clan organisation. Benedict, the Abbot of Peter-
borough, writing of the Council of Cashel, says:— "They
also prescribed in that Council that tithes of all they
possessed should be given to ecclesiastics. For the people
generally had never paid tithes, and did not even know
that they ought to be paid."

The justification of the letters now in question is, that
Henry II. of England, shocked at the moral and religious
depravity of the Irish nation, was burning with apostolic
zeal to bring it back to Christian ways, and the temporal
sovereignty of the Western islands having been granted
long ago by Constantine the Great to Pope Sylvester and
his successors, Henry appealed to the Pope to exercise this
hitherto latent sovereignty by appointing him at once Lord

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 13

and Second Apostle of Ireland. Lanfranc and St. Anselm,
Archbishops of Canterbury, and also St. Bernard, make
similar charges of immorality against the Irish of that
time. The native Irish annals show but too clearly that
the condition of the country was deplorable. The fact was
— however a few excellent individuals of Danish race may
now endeavour to qualify it — the Danes had well-nigh
destroyed Christian civilization in Ireland as well as in
England, and had left the tribes of both countries insanely
warring .against each other — meet prey for the first strong
leader at the head of disciplined forces. In religion, in
morals, in patriotism, in courage, and in the comforts .of
private life, the Irish had at that time reached their lowest
condition since their conversion from Paganism. Still,
the opinions expressed of them by the foreigners mentioned
may be due as much to the differences of organisation and
method alluded to, and to the consequent misunderstand-
ings, as to real Irish vices. St. Bernard wrote more
severely of other people whom he knew than of the Irish
whom he did not know. It is now generally conceded that
the moral condition of Ireland was by no means so bad
as the letters here in question represent. But this does
not affect the authenticity of those letters ; for whatever
may have been Ireland's real condition, it is obvious that
then, as now, a tale could be fabricated sufficiently shock-
ing to justify the Pope, Yand make it his duty, to take
action. And if he was informed in the sense indicated in
these letters, it would be hard to consider too severe any
action he could take.

For the text of the letter bearing Adrian's name, and
that of the first bearing Alexander's name, the oldest
authority is Giraldus Cambrensis. His contemporaries,
Roger de Hovenden and Ralph de Diceto, are also authori-
ties for these two letters, but they add nothing material
respecting them. Roger de Wendover and the continuator
of his historical works, Matthew Paris, wrote in the follow-

14 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

ing century, and may be taken to have adopted the state-
ments of Giraldus. Matthew Paris inserts Adrian's letter
in his Chronica Majora, at A.D. 1155, the year in which
it purports to have been written. His version of it, so far
as it extends, agrees in substance with that of Giraldus;
but his arrangement of the sentences is different, and there
are two sentences missing. To the letter he prefixes the
following note: —

"At that time Henry, king of the English, sending
solemn messengers to Rome, asked Pope Adrian to permit
him to invade the island of Hibernia with military force,
and, extirpating the weeds of vice, to subdue that land,
and bring back those bestial people to the faith and the
way of truth; Wherefore the Pope, gladly approving of
the King's design, accorded to him the following privilege."

In the complete works of Giraldus, published in eight
volumes by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and
under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, Adrian's
privilege occurs three times, namely — in the first, fifth,
and eighth volumes. I now submit a literal translation
from the eighth volume, and in order to economise space,
quote, without a break, the letters of Popes Adrian and
Alexander, with the introductory words prefixed to the
latter by Giraldus : —

" Adrian, Bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his
dearest son in. Christ, the illustrious King of the English,
greeting and apostolical benediction.

"Your Majesty quite laudably and profitably considers
how to extend the glory of your name on earth and increase
the reward of eternal happiness in Heaven, when, as a
Catholic Prince, you propose to extend the limits of the
Church, to announce the truth of the Christian faith to
ignorant and barbarous nations, and to root out the weeds
of vice from the field of the Lord ; and the more effectually
to accomplish this you implore the counsel and favour of
the Apostolic See. In which matter we are confident that
the higher your aim, and the greater the discretion with
which you proceed, the happier, with God's help, will be
your success; because those things that originate in the

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 15

ardour of faith and the love of religion are always wont
to arrive at a good issue and end. Certainly Hibernia and
all the islands upon which Christ the Sun of Justice has
shone, and which have accepted the doctrines of the
Christian faith, of right belong, as your Highness doth
acknowledge, to blessed Peter and the Holy Roman Church.
Wherefore we the more willingly sow in them a faithful
plantation and a seed pleasing to God, in as much as we
know by internal examination that it will be strictly re-
quired of us. You have signified to us, dearest son in
Christ, that you desire to enter the island of Hibernia to
subject that people to laws, and to root out therefrom the
weeds of vice; also that you desire to pay from every
house an annual pension ,of one penny to blessed Peter,
and to preserve ,the rights of the churches of that land
inviolate and whole. We, therefore, regarding with due
favour your pious and laudable desire, and according a
gracious assent to your petition, deem it pleasing and
acceptable that, for the purpose of extending the limits
of the Church, checking the torrent of wickedness, reform-
ing evil manners, sowing seeds of virtue, and increasing
the Christian religion, you should enter that island and
execute whatever shall be conducive to the honour of God
and the salvation of that land. And let the people of that
land receive you honourably and reverence you as lord,
the rights of the churches remaining indisputably inviolate
and whole, and the annual pension of one penny from
every house being reserved to blessed Peter and the Holy
Roman Church. If, therefore, you will carry to completion
what with a mind so disposed you have conceived, study
to form that people to good morals, and, as well by your-
self as by those whom you shall find qualified for the
purpose by faith, word, and conduct, so act that the Church
may be adorned, that the religion of the Christian faith
may be planted and may increase; and let all that con-
cerns the honour of God and the salvation of souls be
ordered in such manner that you may deserve to obtain
from God a plentiful, everlasting reward, and on earth
succeed in acquiring a name glorious for ages.

" Secundi vero privilegii tenor hie, sicut a quibusdam
impetratum asseritur aut confingitur, ab aliis autem un-
quam impetratum fuisse negatur: Here, however, is the
tenor of a second privilege, as by some asserted or fabricated
to have been obtained, but by others denied to have ever
been obtained.

"Alexander, Bishop, servant of the servants of God,

16 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

to his dearest son in Christ, the illustrious King of the
English, greeting and apostolic benediction.

'' In as much as those things which are known to have
been introduced, for sufficient reason, by our predecessors
ought to be confirmed in permanent stability, we, follow-
ing in the footsteps of the venerable Pope and expecting
the fruition of our own desire, do ratify and confirm his
grant over the Hibernian kingdom's dominion bestowed
upon you, reserving to blessed Peter and the Holy Roman
Church, as well in Hibernia as in England, the annual
pension of one penny from every house, so that, the
abominations of that land being eradicated, a barbarous
nation, which, is deemed Christian only in name, may, by
your gentle treatment, put on innocence of morals, and,
the hitherto undisciplined church of those territories being
subjected to discipline, that people may through you
henceforth obtain the name and the reality of the Chris-
tian profession."

The following three letters do not appear to have been
generally known until the eighteenth century. In the
second volume of the Liber Niger Scaccarii, edited by
Thomas Hearne, there are four letters of Pope Alexander
III., beginning on page 41. The first of these relates to
English affairs, not to Irish ; the second is addressed to
King Henry II. in relation to his invasion of Ireland ;
the third, on the same subject, to the Irish princes ; the
fourth, on the same subject, to the Irish hierarchy. A
volume of Migne's Patrologice Cursus is occupied exclu-
sively with the letters of this Pope, and there also, at the
year 1172, these three letters may be seen.

"Alexander, Bishop, servant of the servants of God, to
his dearest son in Christ, Henry, the illustrious King of
the English, greeting and apostolic benediction.

"We have ascertained from general report and the true
relation of many, not without alacrity of mind, how, as a
pious king and mighty prince, with the help of the Lord
— by whose inspiration, as we verily believe, you have
extended your Serenity's power against that rude and un-
disciplined people — you have wonderfully and magnifi-
cently triumphed with respect to that Hibernian nation
which, having laid aside the fear of the Lord, wanders as

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 17

it were unbridled over the precipices of vice, and throws
away the restraints of the Christian religion and of virtue,
and destroys itself by internecine slaughter, and with
respect to that kingdom which the Roman Emperors,
conquerors of the world, left, as we have learned, unentered
in their own times."

[The writer then says that for the present he will omit
mentioning other enormities and vices to which the Irish
were addicted, as he had learned from Christian, Bishop
of Lismore, the Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland, and
Radulphus, Archdeacon of Landaff ; and one wonders what
the omitted enormities must have been, for a few men-
tioned are so foul that to reproduce this part of the docu-
ment here would be an outrage upon the community . and
would expose one to a criminal prosecution for obscenity.
The letter then proceeds] : —

"Wherefore we have learned that, by* means of the
union of your mighty naval and terrestrial army, you,
inspired by divine clemency, have directed your mind to
the subjugation of that people to your dominion, and to
the extirpation of the filth of so great abominations, as
the same archbishops and bishops signify, and the afore-
said archdeacon fully and expressly reports to us, we, as we
ought, do hold it by all means pleasing and acceptable.
And furthermore we make devout thanksgiving to Him
from whom all good proceeds, and Who, in ,-His love of
their welfare, disposes the pious acts and wishes of His
faithful people. Earnestly beseeching Almighty God with
devout prayers that as by the power of your Highness
those forbidden things which are done in the country men-
tioned already begin to desist, and the seeds of virtue to
sprout in place of vice, so also, with the help of the Lord,
may that nation through you, for an imperishable crown
of your eternal glory, and for the progress of its own
welfare, having cast off the filth of sins, take on in every
respect the discipline of the Christian religion.

" Accordingly we request your Regal Excellence, we
charge and exhort you in the Lord, and we enjoin upon
you for the remission of your sins, that you stiffen and
strengthen your mind still more towards this which you
have laudably begun, and by your power call back that
nation to, and keep it in, the refinement of the Christian

C

18 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

faith ; that as, for the obliteration of your sins, you have,
as we believe, undertaken such a great work, so also from
the progress of its welfare you may merit to obtain an
eternal crown.

"And because, like your Highness's excellency, the
Roman Church has in an island a right different from what
it has in a great and continual land, we holding that hope
and confidence from the fervour of your devotion that you
desire not only to preserve but even to extend the rights
of the Church, and that you ought to establish such a
right where none exists, request and earnestly urge upon
your Majesty to anxiously study to preserve for us in the
beforementioned land the rights of blessed Peter ; and if
no such rights exist there, let your Highness institute and
assign the same to the same Church, so that on this account
it may be our duty to return copious thanks to your Royal
Highness, and that you may be seen offering the first fruits
of your glory and triumph to God."

" Alexander, Bishop, servant of the servants of God, to
his beloved children, the distinguished men, petty kings
and princes of Hibernia, greeting and apostolical benedic-
tion.

" As by common report and the certain relation of many
it has become known to us that you have received our
dearest son in Christ, Henry, the illustrious king of
England, for your king and lord, and have sworn fealty
to him, we have felt in our heart a joy so much the greater,
as through the power of that king, with the help of the
Lord, there will be greater peace and tranquility in your
country ; and the Hibernian nation, which by the enormity
and filth of vice appeared to have receded so very far, will
tend more to be informed with divine refinement, and
will better receive the discipline of the Christian faith.

" Whence on account of the fact that you have, of your
own free will, subjected yourselves to a king so potent and
mighty, and a son of the Church so devoted, we watch
your prudence with deserved commendation of praise,
since from it to yourselves, to the Church, and to all the
people of that land, future advantage not unbounded
(utilitas non immodica) may be hoped. We accordingly
warn and very earnestly charge your nobility, that the
fealty which you have sworn under a religious oath to
such "a king, you will take care by due submission to keep

TEXT OF DOCUMENTS TO BE EXAMINED. 19

firm and unshaken : and thus in humility and quietness
show yourselves submissive and devoted to him, that you
may always receive of him richer favour, and it may be
our duty to worthily commend your prudence thereupon."

" Alexander, Bishop, servant of the servants of God,
to his venerable brothers in Christ, the Bishop of Lismore,
Legate of the Apostolic See, Gelasius of Armagh, Donatus
of Cashel, Laurence of Dublin, Catholicus Archbishop of
Tuam, and all their suffragans, greeting and apostolic
benediction.

" By so great enormities of vice is the Hibernian race
infected, and to such an extent are the fear of God and
the restraint of the Christian faith set aside, the result,
which brings about perils of souls, has been notified to
us by a succession of your letters, and no less by the true
relation of others also has frequently come to the notice
of the Apostolic See.

" Hence it is that we rejoice with gladness as we under-
stand from your letters that by the power of our dearest
son in Christ, Henry, the illustrious king of the English,
who, moved by divine inspiration, having, by means of
his united men, subjected to his dominion that race, bar-
barous, uncultivated, and ignorant of divine law, those
things which were so unlawfully committed in your country
already, with God's help, begin to desist. And we heartily
offer immense thanksgiving to Him who has conferred so
great a victory and triumph upon the king just mentioned.
Pray ye humbly beseeching that, by the watchfulness and
solicitude of that king, your own care co-operating, that
undisciplined and untamed race may by all means and in
all things be roused to the refinement of the divine law
and the religion of the Christian faith, and that you and
other churchmen may rejoice in honour and in meet
tranquility.

" Therefore, because it is right that you should manifest
anxious watchfulness and favour to the continuance of
those things which have commenced with such a pious
beginning, we, by apostolic writings, charge and prescribe
to your brotherhood, that, as far as you are able, con-
sistently with your order and office, you diligently and
manfully assist in subjecting and retaining that land for
that renowned king, mighty man, and devoted son of the
Church, and in extirpating thence the filth of so great
abominations.

20 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

" And if any one of the kings, princes, or other men of
that land should attempt with daring rashness to violate
the obligation of his oath, and his fealty pledged to the
aforesaid king, should he not be willing to comply
promptly, as he ought to do, with your admonition, let
you, relying upon apostolic authority and rejecting every
pretext and excuse, assail him with ecclesiastical censure.
Let you so diligently and effectually execute our charge,
that as the aforesaid king, that Catholic as well as most
Christian prince, is said to have piously and kindly
hearkened to us in restoring tithes as well as other just
ecclesiastical rights to you, and in all those things which
appertain to ecclesiastical liberty, so also you should guard
firmly those things which relate to the royal dignity, and,
as far as in you lies, cause others to guard them."

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 21

CHAPTER II.

John of Salisbury and the Evidence attributed to him.

THE document given under Adrian's name, commonly
called the Bull Laudabiliter, bears, as we shall see, a
striking resemblance to a Bull of Adrian's that is un-
questionably genuine. It is the letter which the subse-
quent letter under Alexander's name purports to confirm.
It is the letter mentioned by English historical writers in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and quoted by some
of them. It is the letter upon which the title of Lord of
Ireland rested until the Reformation. It is the letter the
authenticity of which has been recognised by two Popes,
and by an Irish remonstrance addressed to one of them.
It finds a place in the Annales Ecclesiastici of Cc.rdinal
Baronius, in one edition of the Bullarium, and in Migne's
collection. All this, as stated, constitutes a prima facie
case of such overwhelming force as to amply justify our
inquiry, and accounts for one gentleman exclaiming that
there is not a better authenticated fact in the domain of
history. Indeed to question the authenticity of documents
so supported makes some knowing ones shake their heads ;
and, on the suggestion of their spuriousness, a writer
whose blushes must here be spared asks naively in the
Irish Ecclesiastical Record for February, 1893, " could
it be possible ? " The answer to this question is supplied
in the sentence with which Giraldus Cambrensis introduces
the first letter under Pope Alexander's name. In that
sentence the letter is described as one which may have
been fabricated (or pretended) to have been obtained.
Hereby the whole case is given away, and the possibility

22 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

and probability of forgery are admitted by this the very
earliest authority for the text of these alleged Papal
letters.

The latest Editor of the De Principis Instructione, in
which this destructive sentence is prefixed to Alexander's
letter, neither offers a word of comment nor directs his
readers' attention to that sentence ; though, striking as it
does at the authenticity of the letter, it is clearly of vital
importance. Had the letter purported to tamper with,
let us say, the freedom of England, no passage in all
Giraldus's works would have been subjected to closer
scrutiny than this sentence, and no editor would have
ventured to pass it over in silence, except at the risk of his
reputation. Some who maintain that these letters are
authentic similarly ignore this sentence, and withhold from
their readers the knowledge of its existence, thereby in-
voluntarily admitting its force. But there it stands in
black and white, refusing to disappear on being ignored.
When confronted with it they take refuge in the allega-
tion, without any reason, that it is spurious. As if by
way of concession to them, and to his own inclination, Mr.
Dimock says in another place that it may have been
originally a marginal note. By whom? or wherefore
made ? It stands not on the margin but in the text of the
oldest existing manuscript copies; and there is no reason
except its inconvenience for suggesting that it ever stood
anywhere else. And supposing that it did stand on the
margin, it might have been placed there by Giraldus in
obedience to a prick of conscience. The next most likely
person to place it there would be a monk at St. Alban's,
where the work was copied. In either case its force would
not be in any degree weakened, but rather strengthened,
for it would be a record of the cool and dispassionate
doubt of an Englishman naturally pre-disposed to main-
tain the authenticity of the letters unless he saw grave
reason for doubting. But our immediate point is, that

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 23

the sentence gives an affirmative answer to the question :
Could forgery in such a case be possible?

What purports to be the oldest authority for the letter
given under Adrian's name, and what is ultimately the
most difficult to shake, is a passage at the end of a work
called the Metalogicus, written by John of Salisbury, a
very learned priest and polished courtier, who afterwards
became Bishop of Chartres. The work is undoubtedly his,
and was written about 1159 ; but the authenticity of this
particular passage at the end of it has been questioned.

We now approach the most crucial point in our discus-
sion, and if we would solve the riddle before us it is
absolutely necessary to study this man and this writing
very narrowly. We shall have to deal with characters as
interesting, but with none so important. It has been sug-
gested that John's character was not above suspicion, that
he may have written the passage in the Metalogicus
fraudulently and falsely at the bidding of King Henry,
and that the bishopric of Chartres may have been his re-
ward for so doing. I believe it will be more correct, as
well as more pleasant, to reject this odious supposition and
proceed on the assumption that John was an honourable
man and, therefore, incapable of acting in the manner
suggested. I will present the man and the writing as
fairly as space will permit : —

John was born at Old Sarum (Salisbury) between 1115
and 1120. In his youth, before 1130, he went to Paris to
study, and he did not return to England until 1150, that
is to say, for more than twenty years. It is thought that
during part of this time he obtained a living and the
means of pursuing his studies by writing letters and tran-
sacting kindred business for various persons. From 1150
until 1164, excepting some visits to the Continent, he lived
at the Archiepiscopal Court of Canterbury. Some political
and judicial as well as ecclesiastical business was trans-
acted there, and John appears to have discharged the

24 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

duties of secretary, to some extent, for two successive
Archbishops, Theobald and Thomas a Becket. In 1164 he
left England, and both he and Becket spent some years in
exile, returning to England in 1170 when King Henry's
wrath seemed to be appeased. John was present at Canter-
bury, and counselled prudence, when the murderers of
Becket were expected. When they appeared he ran away.
In 1176 he was made Bishop of Chartres, the chapter of
the diocese having elected him unanimously. Whether
this was their own spontaneous action or the result of the
nomination of some higher power, does not appear. John
died at Chartres in 1180. Thus, though he took from his
birth-place the surname by which he was best known, he
spent the greater part of his life on the Continent. The
effect of this may be seen in his language and sentiments,
which are more French or Roman than English. His
" Constantinus noster " and many other expressions are
not at all suggestive of a British Islander. He was a warm
supporter of the Pope's temporal power. He wrote very
graceful Latin, and in classical learning was scarcely
equalled by any man of his age. Most of his writings are
those of a mild-mannered man, and they contain many
passages indicative of his modesty ; but that he could be
peevish is evidenced by his calling the Archbishop of York
an archdevil. A man of his learning and experience must
have been quite conscious of his capacity. While there
was probably some sincerity, there may also have been a
little affectation, in his extending the meaning of Parvus,
which, on account of his smallness of stature, had become
affixed to him as a surname, and describing himself as
" parvum nomine, facultate minorem, minimum merito."
With a view to the present discussion I have sought at
the Lambeth Palace Library and at the British Museum
for the author's manuscript of the Metalogicns, and have
learned that no such thing exists. I have examined the
manuscripts of it that do exist. There is nothing in them

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 25

to show positively when or by whom they were written;
but at both the beginning and the end of them it is in-
timated in red ink that they are copies of writings of John
of Salisbury, who was afterwards Bishop of Chartres.
Judging by the illuminated initial letters one would say
they were probably written in the fourteenth century.
These very manuscripts may have been the sources of
the printed editions, from which they do not differ
materially.

Since we cannot apply the test of handwriting, it be-
comes important in order to judge of the congruity of the
passage in question, to know the subject and general tenor
of the work, the author's usual method, the position this
passage occupies in the work, and the precise words of the
passage.

The work is an interesting one, in which the bitter is
blended with the sweet in a manner suggestive of Swift.
It is divided into four books, each consisting of a number
of short chapters. There is an order and sequence among
the chapters, while at the same time they are so written
that they might stand as separate essays on their respective
subjects. The opening chapter of the work is a character
sketch, the name of the subject not being given. Then
follow chapters more or less abstract, on reason and
morality. From these the author passes to the praise of
eloquence, and afterwards to the praise of exercise. He
then makes a defence of the study of logic ; after which he
seems to turn away to discuss the liberal arts, poetry, art
in general, and devotes a few chapters to grammatical
subjects. In these chapters the author gives incidentally
many glimpses of his student years, nor does he in any of
them wholly lose sight of his main subject, which is
a discussion of the limits of logic and a defence of its
study. But the first book is rather introductory and dis-
cursive. The second book opens with the proposition that
" logic, since it seeks what is true, is serviceable to all

26 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

wisdom." Prom this opening the work is steadily logical,
philosophical, and learned.

As the fourth book of the Metalogicus stands at present,
there are in it forty-two chapters, the forty-second being
that with which we are concerned. Its position at the end
is obviously more favourable than any other position in
the work for the subsequent introduction of matter by the
author or by any other person. Anything so written at
the end would be strictly an addition, not an interpola-
tion. The forty-first chapter ends with a consideration of
eight obstacles of the understanding. The work might
very properly have ended with this chapter. In fact, the
subject is ended, for chapter forty-two contains nothing
relevant to it, and the following is the beginning of the
chapter, so far as it is material for us : —

" But these things so far. For now is a time to weep
rather than to write : and by visible proof I am taught that
the whole world is subject to vanity. For we expected
peace, and behold a disturbance and storm, bursting upon
the people of Tolosa, excites the English and Gauls every-
where. And kings, whom we have seen as dearest friends,
pursue each other insatiably. Besides, the death of our
lord Adrian, the supreme pontiff, while it has afflicted all
peoples and nations of the Christian religion, has moved
with a more bitter sorrow our own England whence he was
sprung, and has watered her with more profuse tears. Upon
all the good a doleful sorrow has fallen, but upon none
more doleful than upon me. For although he had a
mother and a uterine brother, he loved me with a warmer
affection than them. He admitted both publicly and pri-
vately that he loved me beyond all mortals. He had conceived
such an esteem for me that, as often as opportunity offered,
he delighted to pour out his conscience in my sight. And
when he had become Roman Pontiff he was pleased to have
my company at his own table, and he wished the same cup
and plate to serve us both, and us to live in common, a thing
I resisted. At my entreaties he granted and gave to the
illustrious King of the English, Henry the Second,
Hibernia, to be held by hereditary right, as his own letter
testifies to the present day. For all islands are said to
belong by an ancient right to the Roman Church, in virtue

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 2T

of the donation of Constantine, who founded and endowed
it. He also sent by me a gold ring, adorned with a choice
emerald, wherewith an investiture of the right of govern-
ing Hibernia should take place, and hitherto this ring has
been ordered to be kept in the public archives. . . ."

It will be seen that this is quite foreign to the subject
with which chapter forty-one closed. Although in itself
natural enough, here it seems incongruous and out of
place. It might, therefore, be readily stamped as spurious
if the Metalogicus were the work of a writer of strictly
logical methods. But those who on the ground of incon-
gruity brand this chapter as spurious, do not appear to
me to have studied John of Salisbury. Although he wrote
on logic, he resembled a great many people in not always
practising what he preached ; and although the matter of
this chapter is irrelevant to the work to which it is ap-
pended, I am unable to pronounce it on that ground alone
wholly inconsistent with John's character. Nor is there
anything in the style to arouse suspicion. Let us examine
the terms of the passage and compare them with those of
the instrument to which they are said to refer. It is un-
fortunate for that instrument that this passage quoted from
the end of the Metalogicus, the most venerable evidence in
support of its authenticity, itself bears ostentatious and
conclusive evidence of the possibility of forgery. The
quotation actually embodies a classic forgery of precisely
the same order as the one whose possibility is here in ques-
tion. In naming Constantine's donation as the foundation
of this privilege and the source of the power in virtue of
which it was granted, the writer in the Metalogicus settles
the doubt of possibility by reminding us of one of the most
elaborate and successful forgeries in history.

Some time probably in the ninth century, copies of a
document were put in circulation purporting to be a
privilege of the Emperor Constantine the Great, made a
few days after his baptism, and conferring on Pope

28 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Sylvester and his successors the Imperial palaces, the Im-
perial insignia, and lands in Asia, Africa, and Europe,
especially the western islands. It gained credence, and in
the course of the eleventh century found its way into
learned works and into the Canon Law, where it may be
seen to this day embedded, like a fly in amber, in the
standard digest of Canon Law by Gratianus, which has
been read for centuries in the schools and universities of
Europe. It seems to have been considered genuine
throughout the greater part of Christendom. It was
believed in by several Popes, and by them made the
foundation of Bulls, letters, and various proceedings ; and
it was cited in sermons. In the sixteenth century Cardinal
Baronius and other grappled with it, and pronounced it
spurious. Further research since then has confirmed
their view, and now the so-called privilege of Constantine
is universally known to have been an elaborate imposture.
Its present discredit, however, does not disturb its
mediaeval credit and potency. These it could never have
acquired had it not been concocted by a learned and clever
man, and by him skilfully fitted to the facts and persons
of the time to which it purported to belong. To succeed,
it required much more than the bare writing of the docu-
ment. Its success proves that its author was no dunce.
That success at the centre of Christianity and in the face
of learned Europe, removes all doubt with respect to the
easier task of floating a spurious Papal Bull relating to a
remote island. The text of the Imperial privilege and that
of several other questionable documents may be seen in
the writings of Gratianus, and also in the Corjms Juris
Canonici, Decreti Pars Prima, Distinctio XCVI., c. 14.
The following are the passages construed to include
Ireland : —

"' 1. Ecclesiis beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli pro
coiitinuatione luminariorum possessionum predia contuli-
mus, et rebus diversis eas ditavimus, et per nostram im-

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 29

perialem jussionem sacram tain in oriente, quam in occi-
dente, vel etiam septentrionali et meridiana plaga, videlicet
in Judea, Grecia, Asia, Thracia, Affrica, et Italia, vel
diversis insulis, nostra largitate ei concessimus, ea prorsus
ratione, ut per manus beatissimi patris nostri Silvestri
summi Pontificis successorumque ejus omnia disponantur.

"6. Unde.ut pontificalis apex non vilescat, sed magis
quam terreni imperii dignitas gloria et potentia decoretur,
ecce tarn palatium nostrum, ut praedictum est, quam
Romanam urbem, et omnes Italiae sen occidentalium regio-
num provincias, loca et civitates prsefato beatissimo Ponti-
fici nostro Silvestro universali Papae contradimus atque
relinquimus, et ab eo et a successoribus ejus per hanc
divalem nostram et pragmaticum constitutum decernimus
disponenda atque juri sanctae Romanae ecclesiae concedi-
mus permansura."

The Imperial privilege ends by fervently consigning to
eternal perdition all who should dare to resist it.

In his Ecclesiastical History, vol. iv., page 160, Dr.
Lanigan says: — "This nonsense about the Pope's being
head owner of all Christian islands had been partially
announced to the world in a Bull of Urban II., in 1091."
It had, however, been announced as early as 1054 ; but the
announcement of Urban II. was more distinct and agres-
sive, and did not look as if he considered it nonsense. The
following are the words used in a Bull granting the
Liparian Islands to the monastery of St. Bartholomew : —

" Cum universae insulae secundum instituta regalis
juris sint, constat profecto quia religiosi imperatoris Con-
staiitini privilegio in jus proprium beato Petro ejusque
successoribus occidentales omnes insulae condonatae sunt,
maxime quae circa Italiae oram habentur."

After Urban II. no Pope appears to have made any use
of or reference to the supposed Imperial privilege for more
than a hundred years. It was not used by any Pope in the
twelfth century, the century with which we are concerned.
In the thirteenth century it was relied up&n by Innocent
III. and Gregory IX. ; in the fourteenth century by John

30 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

XXII. ; in the fifteenth century by Nicholas V., Calixtus
III., Sixtus IV., and Alexander VI. The foregoing being
all the known instances of Papal reliance on Constantino's
donation, one wonders why so little use was made of an
instrument promising so much. Only one Pope used it in
a way that -could be called rapacious. By the others
named it was used sparingly, diffidently, or only by way
of example ; and even at the time of its greatest vogue the
larger number of Popes do not appear to have mentioned
it at all. Whether this was due to want of faith in it, or to
the difficulty of realising the gift, or to reluctance, or to
indifference, must now remain matter of opinion. Al-
though the temporal power of the Pope may have derived
some advantage from the spurious Imperial donation, it
was not to any appreciable extent due to that instrument,
but was in part assumed by the Popes in their pontifical
character, in part conferred on them by princes and peoples
themselves ; and being based on the pastoral relation to
human souls, it necessarily affected, without distinction,
continents as well as islands. Hence the weakness of the
claim, in so far as it rested upon Constantine, consisted
not in its extent, but rather in its limitation to islands.

The possibility of forgery being easy, an example being
at hand, and suspicion not being modern but as old as the
letters themselves, and coming down to us from the same
authority, and, moreover, the case being one in which no
decisive fact of direct import can be established on either
side, we are not merely justified but bound to inquire
what the truth of the case is, to test and check matters and
persons in every way now open to us, to turn facts and
assertions inside out, and submit them to reason, to balance
probabilities point by point as we proceed, and thus to
glean all the truth they will yield, whatever its tendency.
Alike those who accept and those who reject the Bulls in
question will, if sincere, court the closest scrutiny of them.
Tor, if those documents are authentic, close examination

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 31

will make their authenticity more manifest, and by eluci-
dating strengthen every point that has hitherto been weak
or doubtful. While, on the other hand, if they should fail
to bear this test, if light or inspection should reveal any
falsehood or inconsistency in them, it will be our duty to
follow the clue, and a good deed to expose what is false
and has been too long accepted as true. The facts being
connected chain-like, the destruction of one link would
imperil the whole.

The last chapter of the Metalogicus proceeds to say that
the Papal letter just described had been preserved in the
royal archives, Winchester Castle "to the present day"
[ad hodiernum]. This expression, in so far as it suggests
that a considerable time had elapsed since the letter had
been written, is inconsistent with this chapter having been
written so early as 1159, the date at which it should have
been written to be genuine. On the other hand, if this
chapter was written a number of years later, and, there-
fore, illegitimately, a considerable time having then, in
fact, elapsed, the writer would be peculiarly liable to say
so, that being then the natural thing to say, and, in one
sense, favourable to his purpose.

A warm admirer of John of Salisbury's learning and
character says, " Henry, who asked the privilege, and the
Pope who granted it, believed in Constantine's donation."
Observe the clearness, completeness and conclusiveness of
this assertion as it stands. But does it stand? Where is
the authority for it? There is absolutely none. Neither
of the personages named has left a word to show whether
he believed in Constantine's donation or not. The vigor-
ous assertion wholly lacks confirmation. The more John
of Salisbury is credited with learning the less probable be-
comes his belief in Constantine's donation ; and we cannot,
with any regard for his moral character, suppose that he
made use of it knowing it to be spurious. His learning
also discredits the assumption of the writer in the Meta-

32 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

logicus that Ireland had belonged to Constantine, and was
in his gift. He had a special knowledge of Roman Law,
under which strangers acquired prescriptive ownership of
property by possession continued for a number of years,
and, therefore, he could not possibly have imagined that
the Irish people had lost prescriptive ownership of their
own country by possession continued for many centuries.
Hence, to maintain that he wrote the last chapter in the
Metalogicus amounts to assailing his reputation for
learning and his moral character.

The Bull Lauddbiliter never having been proved, and it
being utterly impossible to prove anything affirmative with
respect to it, the conjecture that it is the document re-
ferred to by the writer in the Metalogicus may be incorrect.
As it is generally accepted, especially by those who main-
tain the authenticity of the Bull, the discussion is best
restricted by our accepting the conjecture. As we pro-
ceed comparing the terms of the letter with those of the
writing in the Metalogicus, and find it becoming more and
more clear that they are absolutely irreconcilable with
each other, the thought will spring up involuntarily that
perhaps the writing refers to some wholly different letter.
It will be well to remember, on each such occasion of diffi-
culty in this one direction, that in the alternative direction
the difficulties are as numerous and formidable.

To what Papal letter does the passage at the end of the
Metalogicus relate? By general consent to the Lauda-
Mliter. But that is a document addressed by a Pope
Adrian not specified to a King of England not named ; and
the brief which purports to confirm it is in the same in-
definite condition. There can, therefore, be no certainty
of identification ; we cannot be sxire that we have before us
the instrument meant by the writer in the Metalogicus ;
and in addition to this, the instrument we have before us
is not in the usual form of a Papal Bull. That this latter
is not at all a trifling difficulty anyone may learn on look-

EVIDENCE OF JOHX OF SALISBURY. 33

ing into the Bullarium and seeing there the letters of
these two Popes, addressed at the beginning to individuals
by name, and at the end specifying the particular Pope,
with the name of the Papal Chancellor by whose hands
they were delivered. We shall have to deal later with an
argument that these letters were written in pursuance of a
common form, and mention it here only for the purpose
of remarking that the most common of all forms was to
address individuals by name, and to conclude Papal letters-
as stated. In no other letter of these two Popes that is
given in full in the Bullarium, are these two common
forms departed from. It is as certain as anything can be
that the Papal scribes who were accustomed to write so
carefully and formally for Adrian and Alexander did not,
on these two occasions only, lapse so sadly as to write these-
letters in the condition in which we find them — a condi-
tion which has been correctly described as being " with-
out head or tail." Had they been so written, no chancellor
would sign or issue documents of their purport in such an
unusual and imperfect condition. To whatever cause or
misfortune the loss may be due, these marks of authenticity
are absent from the more important of the letters we are
considering ; and their imperfect condition, so far from
being trifling, renders their identification and their
authentication alike impossible, and is, therefore, fatal to
their negotiability. It is beyond the power of man to
prove that the Laudabiliter is the letter referred to in the
Metalogicus. It is beyond the power of man to prove that
it is a genuine Papal letter. The plea that these omis-
sions occurred in transcription goes but a short way. From
the beginning to the present day these letters have been
copied thus ; while from the beginning to the present day
other Papal letters, that have been copied as often, have
still retained their marks of authenticity. To say that a
thing was deemed worth preserving as a State Paper in

Winchester Castle and then to offer as an excuse that it

D

34 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

was not deemed worth, copying correctly, is a manifest
contradiction. The conclusion therefore is, that the first
and second of the Bulls in question have in fact always
been copied as originally written ; and all that deters
people from frankly accepting this reasonable conclusion
is the obvious consequence that then the originals could
not have been genuine.

Another obstacle to the identification of the same two
Bulls is the absence of time or place of delivery. It
may be thought that this adaptable condition is convenient,
as it permits of their being fitted by reasoners into the most
sheltered corner. But this is a convenience attended with
some risk. The importance of a date being universally
recognised, one is sometimes appended, and it is " given at
Rome," etc. Things Papal being usually Roman, things
purporting to be Papal are so fitted in the matter of date
as not to disappoint a common expectation. But to this
considerate arrangement the discovery is disastrous that the
Pope did not reside at Rome at the time that either one or
the other of them should have been written to be genuine.

A date has also a use besides assisting in identification.
Its date is a material part of a document, and the affixing,
erasing, or altering of it by an unauthorised person con-
stitutes forgery. The fact of the date of an instrument
having been tampered with is conclusive proof that those
in whose custody it has been have had an interest in it
different from the interest of truth, and have not scrupled
to alter it in favour of that interest. Such tampering
wholly vitiates and invalidates it in their hands and
renders inadmissible, except of grace, any evidence such
persons might desire to offer regarding it or any document
connected with it. A person who would alter the date of
an instrument to suit a purpose would have as little scruple
in writing the whole instrument, or as many of the sort as
his purpose required.

The Lauddbiliter differs from genuine Bulls of the

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 35

period, in bearing neither the name of him to whom it is
alleged to have been addressed, nor the names of those who
on Henry's behalf are said to have obtained it, nor the
signature of the Pope at the end to specify which Adrian
issued it, nor the signature of the Papal chancellor, nor
the place whence it was issued, nor the month, nor the
year of Christ, nor the year of Adrian's pontificate. If the
absence of any one of these particulars might raise a ques-
tion of authenticity, the absence of them all seems to
leave little trace of authenticity to be looked for.

The Laudabiliter itself says explicitly that it was granted
at the request of the King. The writer in the Metalo-
gicus says as explicitly that he obtained it at his own
request [ad preces meas]. Let supporters of the letters
reconcile these two contradictory statements if they can.
Anyone who examines the writings of John of Salisbury
will readily concede that he was quite incapable of such a
wanton breach of taste, prudence and truth as this state-
ment would be if the favour had been obtained at the
request of the King. Indeed it is obvious that in a semi-
political matter he was a man much more likely to attri-
bute undue merit to his King than to detract merit that
was really due to the King, and appropriate it to himself.
On the other hand, did any Pope ever transfer, or attempt
to transfer, the dominion of one country to the king of
another, on the entreaty of a private individual, without
being asked by the king about to be favoured, and without
consulting the nation about to be affected? Never. Yet
mark, the writer who has the incredible conceit to claim
that he, by his own entreaties, accomplished this extra-
ordinary feat, is, we are asked to believe, the same who
describes himself as Johannes Minimus Merito.

The statements in the Metalogwus are couched, with
such skill veiled as simplicity, in what seems to be a
natural and spontaneous expression of the writer's thoughts,
that on the first reading, although one feels that there is

36 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAXD.

something wrong, he gives a reluctant assent, not knowing-
where the defect lies. Just turn back to the passage
quoted and judge if the familiarity with the Pope was not
somewhat excessive. Read how the Pope loved John better
than he loved his mother and brother. Read the climax,
how the Pope declared publicly and privately that he
loved John beyond all mortals. Consider whether this is-
not overdone. Then consider whether it is not like a
vigorous invention to prepare the reader to accept the still
more astounding statement that at this man's request the
Pope had made a present of Ireland to the King of Eng-
land. Further, conceive the same Pope there and then
dictating a Bull to the effect that he was giving this same
favour at the King's request. Behold ! Finally, turn to-
Giraldus, Hovenden, Wendover, Matthew Paris, and other
old writers who mention the Bull and you will find them
stating that it was granted at the King's request, of which
a solemn embassy consisting of three bishops and the Abbot
of St. Albans are said to have been the bearers. More astonish-
ing still, all these conflicting accounts of how the Bull
was obtained are now put forward by the same icriters, but
at such distances apart that a casual reader may have for-
gotten one theory before he has reached its rival. When
the theories are gathered together in a handy bundle as
here, the impossibility of all of them being true becomes
so obvious that one naturally asks if any one of them is
true, and feels tempted to throw the bundle into the fire.
In truth, all of them are assailable; but here we must
confine ourselves to the claim made in John's name, and
we have found it to be irreconcilable alike with his char-
acter and with the letter to be authenticated.

The letter purports to confer rights and powers of which
the writer himself, as Pontiff, was the source. The writer
in the Metalogicus speaks of a letter conferring temporal
ownership in virtue of a power derived from Constantine
the Great. The letter claims in a vague manner for the

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 37

Homan Church, but does not transfer to Henry, all islands
upon which Christ, the Sun of Justice, has shone. This
•extensive claim is not, and obviously could not have been,
based on the supposed donation of Constantine. The
writer does not say Avhat the basis of the claim is. Whence
ihe power was supposed to be derived is in itself im-
material to us. We are only concerned to observe that the
letter and the chapter contradict each other with regard to
ihe source of the power, as they do upon other points, and
that the letter does no purport to transfer any right of
•ownership, while the chapter says it does.

The writer of the letter and the writer in the Meta-
logicus speak of rights that are essentially different. The
letter is entirely devoted to spiritul matters, religious and
moral. Spiritual motives are the only ones manifested in
it. It is only for spiritual purposes that it approves of
Henry's going to Ireland, and the rights and powers which
it purports to confer on him are spiritual, and intended for
those purposes. In extent they are limited only by
Henry's own notion of what the case required. Practi-
cally that means unlimited. They are, therefore, more
-extensive than the powers conferred on any Papal Legate.
'The letter approves of his entering the country, to extend
the limits of the Church, to announce the truth of the
'Christian faith, to root out the weeds of vice from the field
of the Lord, to check the torrent of wickedness, to reform
evil manners, to sow seeds of virtue, to increase the Chris-
tian religion, and to execute whatever should be conducive
to the glory of God and the salvation of that land ; and it
goes beyond all this by assuring Henry that the higher his
aims the happier would be his success. All these were
very excellent purposes if needed, and the power to effect
them would have been well bestowed on a suitable person.
No doubt it becomes somewhat startling when we reflect
that to do all this the Pope must have ignored or super-
seded his own Legate then in Ireland and the whole Irish

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Hierarchy, and without consulting them, placed this wilful
young layman over their heads — a spiritual autocrat,
armed with unlimited spiritual powers. But this inherent
improbability must be dealt with later, and is not the point
of this paragraph. Extensive though the range of ap-
proval is, it includes nothing which did not belong to the
Papal office. Its bestowal would neither have transferred
sovereignty nor conveyed seisin, nor in any way consti-
tuted Adrian a donor of other people's property. No
learned man, least of all John of Salisbury, would mis-
take them for a hereditary right to possess the country.
Few men of his time, if any, knew the difference between
spiritual and temporal rights better than did John of
Salisbury. To mark and maintain the distinction between
them was one of the duties of his life. To confuse them or
mistake one for the other was a species of blunder not to
be attributed to any learned man, but least of all to him.
He was guarded from it by his learning, by his mode of
life, and by this additional and peculiar fact that if he had
obtained the letter by his own prayers he would have
known better than anyone else what its contents and
purport were.

We have no difficulty in believing that the acquisition
of both a hereditary right to possess the country and
ecclesiastical omnipotence in the country would have been
very acceptable to Henry, and that both the letter and the
'chapter in the Metalogicus, while irreconcilable with each
other, quite harmonized with his views. Is not this har-
mony suspicious and suggestive? The Lauddbiliter pur-
ported to confer upon Henry unlimited ecclesiastical
power. The Metalogicus purported to confer upon him un-
limited temporal power. These were just the things to
acquire which was the object of his whole policy in Eng-
land. No gift could be more complete. Nothing more
remained to be given. Than both together, nothing could
be more comprehensive, nothing more agreeable to Henry,

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBUEY. 39

or more in accordance with his ambition. If both were
written by sycophants in his own palace, and at his own
dictation, they could not have more fully gratified his de-
sires. So far as regarded the matter of them, he could not
be expected to quarrel with either ; and he would naturally
trust to others to make them reconcilable with each other,
and otherwise presentable. The most consistent policy of
Henry's life was to maintain that spiritual and temporal
power were alike inseparable parts of the royal prerogative,
that the Church was a department of the State, and that to
him as head of the State belonged the property and rights-
of the Church, including the right to appoint its officers,
its bishops and clergy. The position of the Church in his
dominions gave frequent occasion for his assumptions ; for
if it had the strength it had also the weakness incidental
to a State Church. One of the commonest of these is the
inevitable tendency of individual clergymen of such a
Church to look for promotion to livings, not as a reward of
good work among the people, but as a result of intrigue.
Henry was courted for favours, which, like Pilate, he
should never have had the power to bestow. He sometimes
kept sees vacant for a time, and thus had the double
pleasure of enjoying their revenues and homage of the
candidates for them. The relations between the Church
and him were continually strained, and his conduct was the
cause of most of the troubles. The policy of the Church,
so far from being one of slavish acquiescence, as these letters
would convey, was one of consistent resistance. St.
Thomas of Canterbury, in a letter to Pope Alexander III.,
complains that Henry was improperly assuming that
dominion over the Church of England was his " by here-
ditary right." Pope Alexander III. writes to Henry,
under date 9th October, 1167, a long letter, crammed from
beginning to end with complaints, warnings, and threats.
He directly accuses Henry of being another Csesar, and
worse than Csesar, since he unlawfully and to the peril of

40 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

his soul dares to usurp, not merely the things which belong
to Caesar, but those also which belong to God. He tells
Henry that his conduct is unworthy of a king and contrary
to royal justice ; and adjures him, in the name of the Lord,
to change his ways, for the sake of the Church and for the
remission of his sins. This was strong language to address
to such a man, as strong as could be used without an
utter breach, as strong as the most advanced democrat of
the present day could desire. It would be easy to cite
other letters and documents to the same effect, all written
— mark well — before Henry's character had been stained
by the murder of Beckett. When the ominous struggle
between Henry and Thomas a Becket had been brought to
a close, and Thomas had returned from exile to Canterbury,
Pope Alexander wrote a congratulatory letter to Henry,
on what then appeared to be the happy termination of the
struggle and the restoration of peace. If this Pontiff had been
addicted to that fulsome flattery, with which these letters
relating to Ireland teem, this was a tempting and pardon-
able occasion for giving way to that weakness. The Pope
does nothing of the sort, relinquishes not an iota of the
rights of the Church, but insists upon the last farthing, so
to speak, and writes a letter worthy of his office and of
himself. Power of every kind, and hereditary right, were
things dear to Henry's heart, documents conferring all of
them were certain to please him, but he knew better than
to look to the Pope for them.

The letter and the passage in the Metalogicus being
in obstinate disagreement, a desperate attempt is made to
bridge the chasm at this point by suggesting that the
phrase " hereditary right " in the latter was justified by
the petition for the privilege rather than by the privilege
itself, and that the petition was written by John of Salis-
bury, and was therefore in his mind. The architect of
this fantastic bridge had better not take his stand upon it.
He describes John as " morally and intellectually one of

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 41

the most imposing figures of the thirteenth century." John
of Salisbury had been dead twenty years before the
thirteenth century began. But overlooking that fact, this
remains, that if he presented a petition for a hereditary
right to possess Ireland, he failed to obtain that right, yet
here he is represented as expressly stating that he had ob-
tained it, and by his own prayers. This seems to leave his
moral figure in rather a bad plight.

John of Salisbury was a prolific writer for that age. A
collection of his works in prose and verse may be seen in
Migne's volumes. Although they deal with a great variety
of subjects and show their author to have been communi-
cative, they do not contain a word in confirmation of either
the Laudabiliter or the passage in the Metalogicus. We
need not consider his poetry or his works on distinctly re-
ligious subjects, in which these matters have obviously no
place. But his letters are numerous, constituting the
largest portion of his writings, and so full of anecdotes and
reminiscences that a biography of him might be compiled
from them. From writing letters for other people he
took to writing for himself; and 339 of his letters, pre-
served in Migne's collection, are spoken of as few, so many
did he write. Some of these, however, were written in the
name of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but the greater
number by far were written in his own name, and in all
the language, the sentiments, the literary and autobio-
graphical flavour are clearly his own. Rev. W. B. Morris
when pursuing the same inquiry in which we are engaged
said to himself, very naturally, if John of Salisbury had
this Bull so much on his mind that he could not keep it
out of a treatise on Aristotle and Logic, surely he will
mention it to the persons concerned and to his intimate
friends. Father Morris thereupon examined all these
letters, and although the collection contains twenty-seven
letters addressed to Pope Adrian, eleven to King Henry II.,
and twenty-three to Pope Alexander, extending over the

42 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

years from 1155 to 1180, and some of them relating to
subjects in which mention of the privilege, if it existed,
would have been germane and in order, there is no such
mention nor anything that could be construed as such.
This is, indeed, negative evidence, but of such cogency
that it is scarcely necessary to point the moral. It reduces
us to a choice of two propositions : Either (a) this com-
municative man, who is said to have been so anxious in
1155 about the condition of Ireland, wrote all those letters
during all those years without once mentioning that object
of his anxiety, and wrote to the persons who are alleged to
have been concerned in this privilege, and to others, with-
out once mentioning that he had procured it, a thing which
if true, would have been fair matter for boast, and vastly
more important than many things he writes about; or
(&) his silence, otherwise unaccountable, is satisfactorily
explained by his not knowing any of these things, never
having obtained the privilege or heard of its existence,
and never having written the last chapter now in the Meta-
logicus. Of these two propositions which is the more
probable? Only one answer is possible. Add to this
the fact that while the latter proposition would simplify
the whole case, the former would leave it for ever
perplexed.

The letters furnish more than this strong negative
evidence. If John of Salisbury be accepted as a witness in
his own defence, his letters furnish positive evidence of
the most striking and apt character that his writings were
tampered with, that liberties were taken with his name
in his own time, and that all writings bearing his name
are not his. His letter, numbered 61, is addressed to King
Henry in answer to an inquiry regarding certain letters
which had reached Henry, purporting to have been written
by John of Salisbury, and complaining that the writer had
been passed over while one less entitled had obtained
ecclesiastical promotion. Nothing could look more plausible

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 4

and genuine, nothing more unassailable, than letters of
that class written to the King at a time when promotion
would have been acceptable to John. Were they authentic ?
John's answer is an indignant and spirited denial that he
had written such letters. His tone may be gathered from
this extract: —

" Ecce, Domino inspectore et judice, loquar in auribus
vestris quod verum est. Litteras istas nee scripsi, nee
scribere volui, nee ab aliquo meorum scriptas novi. Fal-
sae sunt, et eis ad delusionem vestram, et sui damnationem
solus falsarius scienter usus est."

After his letters, our author's largest work is the Poli-
craticus ( = Statesman's Book), described by way of sub-
title as a treatise de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philo-
sophorum. These names being appropriate, it will be
understood that the work is extensive and its limits elastic.
It is a work nearly three times as large as the Metalogicus,
and occupies about seven hundred small octavo pages. It
is divided into eight books, each made up of short chapters.
These are like so many separate essays. In some casea
their arrangement shows their relation to each other ; in
parts they do not appear to have been arranged but only
mixed. They run over a variety of subjects — religious,,
moral, philosophical, literary, musical, historical, and
political, most of them having some bearing on or relation
to the court politics of the author's time, and some
chapters being expressly devoted to current politics. In
short, it is a collection of congenial studies for a statesman
of the twelfth century, relieved by lighter matter.

The sixth book of this work is taken up mainly with the
application of moral and religious rules to the military
profession, and some illustrations %are drawn from recent
and current English affairs. A tribute is paid to Henry II.
for having calmed the storm raised by Stephen, and paci-
fied the island. This book would have been a most appro-
priate place in which to mention the privilege we are

44 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

discussing, or anything else of that character. Its
suitability becomes still more obvious when we read in the
twenty-fourth chapter of this book the following words : —

" I remember an occasion of visiting, away in Apulia,
•our lord, the Pontiff, Adrian the Fourth, who admitted
me to the utmost familiarity; and I tarried almost three
months with him at Beneventum. When accordingly, as
is usual among friends, we often chatted about many
things, and he inquired familiarly and diligently from me
what people thought regarding himself and the Roman
Church, I, employing freedom of spirit, laid frankly before
Tiim the evil things which I had heard in divers provinces.
For, as was said by many, the Roman Church, which is
ihe mother of all churches, shows herself not so much a
mother as a stepmother."

He proceeds to give the substance of his free conversations
with the Pope and many details of what passed between
them. In it all there is nothing unseemly or improbable,
nothing about using the same cup and plate, nothing about
loving John beyond all mortals, and alas for our privilege
there is not a word about it. Yet those who maintain that it
is genuine assure us that this was the occasion on which it
was obtained, and that to obtain it was the special object
•of this visit, the special purpose for which John had been
sent to the Pope. It is also presumably the occasion re-
ferred to in the Metalogicus. Why then are we not told of
ihe privilege here, where the statement would have been
germane to the matter in hand, almost a duty, almost an
essential part of the record? How can the omission be
accounted for? We are offered two explanations: first,
that Henry for some political reason desired the privilege
to be kept a secret ; secondly, that it was of no importance,
not worth mentioning. If these explanations are sound
they will bear examination.

With regard to explanation number one : Both the
Policraticus and the Metalogicus were finished in Henry's
dominions in 1159. If the last chapter in the Metalogicus

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 45-

was written then and by the same writer, as it expressly
purports it to have been — at the date of the siege of Toulouse
— how was the King's secret kept? Again, the same per-
sons who allege this desire of Henry to keep the privilege
secret tell us that it was discussed in 1156 at an assembly
of notables, and that Henry was dissuaded by his mother
and the Saxons from putting it in force. For this state-
ment they refer to Robert de Monte. Feeble though his
support would be, he does not give it to the alleged Bulls ;
he does not say they were discussed ; he makes no mention
whatsoever of them, and gives no reason for supposing that
he ever heard of them. The discussion, the dissuasion, and
the King's secret are alike imaginary and ridiculous. If
not, how did a matter discussed in an assembly in 1156 be-
come a secret three years later, and such a curious secret,
too, that the principal actor was free to mention it in a
book with which it had no connection whatever, but dared
not mention it in the book of which, if true, it should
properly have formed a part ? The most plausible reason
alleged for the secret is Henry's unwillingness to become
indebted to the Pope for this privilege in relation to Ire-
land. But then the simplest way to avoid getting a favour
was, not to ask it ; and those who support the privilege say
that he sent a solemn embassy to the Pope to ask it. What
a strange mode of avoiding getting this same favour from
the Pope. If there was a secret, the obvious and, so far as
I know, the only tolerable explanation of it is, that Henry
had the LaudabiJiter, of his own manufacture, up his sleeve,
ready to be launched or withheld as State policy might
dictate when the parties to whom it was to be attributed
were no more, and the danger of repudiation was over.

Explanation number two says the privilege was not
worth mentioning. J$oi worth mentioning in a book on
politics, though worth mentioning in a book on logic ! Xot
worth mentioning by the man who is said to have procured
it, although he is a man addicted to gossiping about trifling

46 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

incidents of his own life ! And they who hold at one
point of their argument that the privilege was not worth
mentioning are the same people who tell us that John of
Salisbury, three bishops, and an abbot were sent to the
Pope specially to solicit this very thing which, when
obtained, is not worth mentioning in an account of the
mission written by one of the parties. If this is not an
attempt to blow hot and cold out of the same mouth, I
know not what is.

If either the chapter or the Bull is spurious, both are
-certainly so. As a spurious chapter could not have been
circulated, except privately, without risk of repudiation
while John of Salisbury lived, we get 1180 as the earliest
date at which the chapter can have been made public, " It
is not absent from a single copy of the Metalogicus and is,
therefore, no interpolation," writes an ardent upholder of
the supposed Bulls. Mark what a perfect statement we
have here, clear, explicit, and uncomprising. What is its
value? If correct it will bear examination. Let us see.
The writer does not say that he has examined a single
manuscript copy of the work. If you believe he has, as
his statement induces you to do, you are convinced at
once. If, in fact, he has not, which is extremely probable,
his statement amounts to no more than that a
printing machine has turned out a number of copies
exactly alike, and you begin to suspect that he has been
jesting or taking an advantage of you. The work was
already old when printing became possible ; the two or
three editions of it that have been printed are nearly alike
and may have been produced from the same manuscript
copy, and all friends of the alleged Bulls are heartily wel-
come to any comfort they can derive from a resemblance
due to the uniform action of a printing machine. A
spurious chapter at the end of a work is by no means in-
credible to people acquainted with the liberties sometimes
taken in the days of manuscript books ; and I am con-

EVIDENCE OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. 47

fident tliat every reasonable reader will think he has now
had ample proof that the chapter we are dealing with is
spurious.

It will scarcely he asked what motive there was for
writing this spurious chapter, for the motive has become
obvious more than once in the course of the argument. The
impulse to gratify such a man as Henry II. is a motive of
dangerous power. He whose wish was so promptly obeyed
in the murder of Thomas a Becket could have experienced
no difficulty in getting a clever man willing to write a
false chapter at the end of a book, and any Bulls or other
documents his interest demanded. The work was not done
perfectly, a forger's work rarely is. Yet it was not done
without considerable skill. Each document might pass
muster if not examined closely and checked with the other
and with the facts of the time. Had they been genuine,
this checking would have strengthened both. It has had
the opposite effect. It has shown the documents to be
antagonistic, irreconcilable, mutually destructive.

The limits of space forbid the development of all the
difficulties that stand in the way of ascribing the last
chapter in the Metalogicus to John of Salisbury. But the
question remains : Why was it with his work that this
liberty was taken? Although the answer may have been
gleaned in the argument, it had better be formulated ex-
pressly. It is very simple. It is of the essence of forgery
to seek a victim possessing the greatest number of points
of probability and speciousness, and to make the false
writing resemble his as closely as possible. The matter of
the chapter being desirable to Henry, there was not a man
in all his dominions to whom it could be more plausibly
and effectively attributed than John of Salisbury. His
career, his pliant character, and his mode of life eminently
fitted the part. Well known as a man accustomed to write
letters for other people, and, therefore, possessing facility
in expressing thoughts other than his own, on an occasion

48 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

arising for a State forgery, he stood marked as precisely the
man whose work might be so tampered with most effec-
tually. We have it on his own authority, in language
amounting to a solemn oath and addressed to the King,
that forgery was committed in his name. We have found
that if the Laudabiliter is the letter to which the last
chapter in the Metalogicus relates, the latter is false in its
statements — false in the matters of which John of Salis-
bury had knowledge special and intimate, was written for
a base purpose, was intended to affect unjustly a whole
nation, and was, in several respects, such as John of Salis-
bury could not, without crime, have written. To maintain
that he wrote it would be to maintain that he wrote for
hire deliberate falsehoods of the greatest magnitude. This
would be such a grave charge against John as we cannot
accept the responsibility of making, in face of all the
strong reasons already urged, and in face of the purity,
grace, and plausibility of John's character, as revealed in
his writings. The conclusion is that, by whomsoever
written, the most venerable document adduced to prove the
authenticity of the Laudabiliter is itself a spurious docu-
ment, imparting discredit and not support. In destroying
it we have necessarily damaged the Laudabiliter, of which
it has always been the strongest prop. We, therefore, part
company with John for the present, leaving, in our
opinion, his character intact, his hands clean ; but the
chapter utterly destroyed, and the Laudabiliter deprived
of its support and gravely damaged. On the latter, how-
ever, let judgment be reserved until we have completed our
inquiry.

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSLS. 49

CHAPTER III.

Character of Giraldus Canibrensis.

THE reader is invited to maintain and fortify during the
examination of the second witness for the Bulls that
attitude of judicial impartiality found to be so necessary
during the examination of the first. John of Salisbury,
having nothing relevant to tell us, has been turned out of
court. Giraldus Cambrensis is a bearer of evidence. He
is the only original bearer of the two principal Bulls, and
of doubt regarding the authenticity of one of them, and
he says that both were published at a Synod of Bishops
at Waterford in 1175. That is all the direct evidence
he bears, and no one else bears any evidence. We have
already partially examined the Bulls, and will complete
the work in due course. The immediate question of
supreme importance is, whether Giraldus is or is not a
credible and irrefragable witness when he 'makes state-
ments in themselves improbable, stands unsupported, and
admits doubt to some extent. It is important, because
on our decision with regard to it hinges the further
question, whether we are to believe the Bulls to be genuine
or not. " Among the good rules of honest history, that
is certainly not the hindmost which directs a reader
desirous of ascertaining the truth of what is narrated to
give little heed to the number of writers, but a great deal
to the trustworthiness of the first writer from whom others
have copied." — White's Apologia, p. 194. To copy the
Bulls from Giraldus is not to confirm him or them ; and
as this is what contemporary and subsequent writers have

50 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

done, they add no element of certainty, and he remains
the sole support of those documents. Before him they
were never known. Beyond him, or to any other besides
him, the text of them has never been traced; though,
to be genuine, that under Adrian's name should have
been written more than thirty years before Giraldus wrote,
and there were in the meantime writers in abundance
and with ample facilities for copying. On him, therefore,
and on him alone, they must depend. If he by himself
is a really reliable and sufficient support, they stand.
Were he to fail as a witness, they should be abandoned.
This question cannot be considered without considering
and testing his character, and especially his veracity. A
clear conception of the entire man, his principles, motives,
and methods, is essential to impartiality and justness of
decision, and will at the same time greatly conduce to
brevity in dealing with his statements and in the entire
remainder of our discussion. Fortunately, a study of
Giraldus himself will also be in accordance with his own
ideas; for, be it innocence or be it vanity, he considered
his character as admirable a subject as could occupy the
mind of man, and the study of it was always gratifying
to him. With us the result may be different.

His is a most difficult character to study or to delineate
impartially. Himself a combination of antitheses and
full of exaggeration, he generates exaggeration in his
readers, being for some a hero, for others a monster. Any-
one now reading an account of him for the first time will
do well to start with the belief that he was neither. Many
of my readers have already made acquaintance with him,
and are competent to judge with what success I try to
avoid both extremes.

Giraldus de Barri is best known as Cambrensis from his
native country, Cambria or Wales : —

" Kambria Giraldum genuit, sic Cambria mentem
Erudiit, cineres cui lapis iste tegit."

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBREXSIS. 51

He was the son of an Anglo-Norman father and of a
Welsh mother, both of whom were of high rank and
influentially connected. He was a nephew of David Fitz
Girald, Bishop of St. David's, the most skilful and
influential abettor of Dermot Mac Murrough and the man
who did most to raise, chiefly from among his own kindred,
the band of Welsh-Norman soldiers who first came over to
recover Leinster for Dermot and for themselves. In his
childhood Giraldus manifested so much talent and piety
that his father was accustomed to call him "the little
bishop." The desire thus early inculcated was doomed to
disappointment, but not owing to deficiency of talent.
Bather the contrary; for Giraldus was the most brilliant
man Wales had till then produced, or produced for long
after. He was, like John of Salisbury, a priest and a man
of exceptional ability, but of a different type in both
respects. His works are far better known than John's,
and have always enjoyed a considerable amount of popu-
larity. He was a more prolific writer, too, being a man
of quicker wit, greater fluency, and writing with less
regard for consistency and less deliberation. His Latin
is occasionally corrupt, but it is very brisk, animated,
and readable ; and, no matter how trivial or commonplace
his theme, interest in it never flags. He was a man of
extensive reading and great versatility, but of an exagge-
rated sensibility, and so excitable and fanciful that he
wrote, and perhaps believed for the moment as facts,
absurdities that existed only in his own disordered brain
or were gathered from no matter what quarter. With
little fixity of conviction, except in the matter of his own
greatness, he adopted statements and opinions on impulse,
not on reasonable grounds ; and even had he been more
careful to reconcile them than he was, thus drawn from
different extraneous sources and by an ever-changing
process, his statements should necessarily be, as they are,
frequently preposterous and in conflict with each other.

52 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Endowed with some of the finest qualities, he had in him
the spoiling, and more than the spoiling, of every one of
them; so that as a literary man he can on the whole be
regarded only with regret as self-spoiled. He knew not
his merits from his defects, he had no regard for proportion
or moderation and little for the discipline of truth. He
makes some of his silliest statements with a solemnity
so grave that it seems almost sincere ; but sincere only
for the moment, for on his next literary flower his hum
may be different and even contradictory. Of true dis-
interested sincerity, of which self-sacrifice is the test and
constancy the mark, he had none. He is most eloquent
in invective, but he attains his highest level of merit when
depicting in a scarcely conscious manner what he really
knows. All his works are sprinkled with personal sketches
of the appearance, character and habits of the leading men
with whom he is dealing. These sketches are really excel-
lent, piquant, animated and vivid. Although they all
show bias, favourable or unfavourable, and in many
instances conceal a treacherous dagger ; yet, being clearly
drawn from life, they must be in the main true, and they
are of considerable literary and historical interest. The
hearts for which the daggers were intended being long
still, a reader may now enjoy the sketches without remorse.
They form perhaps the most delightful part of all
Giraldus's writings, and in their class have seldom been
surpassed in any age. But he too soon becomes self-
conscious, and wantonly spoils his best effects before they
are completed, by reverting to his vice of counter-balancing
antitheses which he wrongly believes to be his highest
art. So infatuated is he with his literary theory that he
adheres to it in defiance of truth and reason. If, outside
his own immediate relatives, he finds himself obliged to
give anyone credit for a good quality, he promptly adds
credit for some very bad vice as a counterpoise. Both
accounts may have been true of many of his subjects;

CHARACTER OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 53

but -where the fact failed in this respect he did not hesitate
to invent, not in pure malice, but for the sake of his moral
theory that great virtues were usually counter-balanced
by great vices, and his corresponding literary theory that
this mode of presenting the matter was the only one that
gave the necessary variety and harmony to his story.
Throughout all his works he is influenced by this theory
even in his choice of words, and he delights to play upon
and place in juxtaposition words nearly alike in sound
but opposed in meaning. These cunning trifles lose their
rhythm, their sole merit, in the process of translation
from one language to another, and are indeed little better
than puns. They are not the form which real power
assumes in literature, nor are they worthy of such power
as Giraldus possessed. They help the reader along by
showing a pleasing agility in the manipulation of words,
as goats among rocks enliven a landscape ; but when over-
done, as with Giraldus, the practice becomes a vulgar
vice. By his weakness for scandal also, and by making
his literary work the vehicle of his personal jealousies
and animosities, Giraldus has revealed himself more truly
than the things he meant to reveal ; and while effectually
excluding his works from the highest class, has imparted
to them a vitalizing quality of a lower order which never
fails to attract readers. After the readers have enjoyed
him, few of them will close the book with that respect for
Giraldus to which he expected his works would give him
an indisputable title. They are more likely to dismiss
him with that contemptuous charity which would have
most galled him in life.

In England he has always been considered an interesting
rather than an important author, and his popularity has
always rested and still rests on the unfailing charm and
freshness of his romance ; for his writings are generally
regarded as to a large extent romance irrespective of the
nature of his ostensible subject. So far as they related to

54 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

England, Englishmen were able of themselves to dis-
criminate between the grotesque exaggeration and the
reality; and the writings were enjoyed for their own sake,
the statements they embodied being rejected or mentally
sifted. So far as the works related to Ireland, though
they were at least as grotesque, some English writers have
professed to believe them, just as some profess to believe
caricatures of Irishmen to the present day — because they
wish those things to be true of Irishmen, and would feel
pained if disabused. Giraldus was the first to pander to
this base appetite.

In Ireland so long as Gaelic literature prevailed few
beyond the Pale knew Giraldus, and those few appear to
have regarded him with contempt. After the destruction
of Gaelic under Queen Elizabeth, the literature of England
and of the Pale began to spread ; and when the Irish
became acquainted with Giraldus they took him more
seriously than he had ever been taken before. The learn-
ing and literature of the country ceased to be Irish and
gradually became Anglican. James Ussher, Peter Lom-
bard and David E-othe were amongst the first distingui-
shed men of the new era. Their learning being essentially
that of England, and Gaelic having for them little more
than an antiquarian interest, they sought no Irish
corroboration, made no inquiry, evinced no doubt ; and
for the first time since they were written Giraldus's
statements were accepted as those of a serious historian
if not a sage. The Irishmen named repeat his statements
on his authority, whatever that may be worth, naming
Englishmen who have done the same, but neither produc-
ing nor seeking any other original authority. Their
adhesion to the alleged Bulls therefore amounts to no
more than that Giraldus had said so. That was known
before as well as after. They do not add a pebble to the
structure raised by him. We are thus thrown back upon
him. Whatever be the quarter to which we address our

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 55

questions, echo answers — Giraldus. Xo one having so
far attacked or exposed Giraldus, and the cause in which
he wrote being in the ascendant and at the same time in
need of continued support, his reputation was rather a
thing to be sustained in the interest of established
authority. Unfortunately it was in the same interest that
the smaller of the two nations then in Ireland, in pursuit
of the policy and by the aid of an external power, denied
and penalized the acquisition of knowledge by the larger,
to the permanent injury of both, or rather to the injury
of the whole which the union of both should have con-
stituted. In spite of the hard conditions and difficulties
which the Penal Laws threw in the way of literary effort
and historical research, two Irishmen of the seventeenth
century managed to throw some light upon Giraldus from
the effects of which he has never recovered. One was
Stephen White, S. J., author of the Apologia pro Hibernia ;
the other was Dr. John Lynch, Archdeacon of Tuam,
author of Cambrensis Eversus. Subsequent research has
shown that some of their assumptions were incorrect; but
this is not so to a greater extent than is usual in English
historical works of the same century. Subject to these
corrections, their estimate of Giraldus is substantially that
which has since prevailed in Ireland, and which also
prevails in England, as we shall see. The Cambrensis
Eversus was honestly written with the means at the
author's disposal ; and after all deductions have been made
it contains numberless shrewd and sound points brilliantly
expressed which still remain absolutely unshaken and
which are so many nails in Giraldus's coffin. In Ireland,
however, some have with less knowledge gone further and
painted Giraldus without a redeeming trait. This seems
to have occasioned in his favour a partial re-action which
happens to find expression in two works of peculiar and
permanent importance.

The Apologia is ,a small work and remains in its

5(1 THE DOUBTFUL GRAXT OF IRELAND.

original Latin. The Cambrensis Eversus is a great and
elaborate work of historical interest extending far beyond
the questions connected with Giraldus. It has been
translated, and unfortunately edited also, for the Celtic
Society by the Rev. Matthew Kelly of Maynooth College.
The editing is unfortunate because it consists not in
correcting typographical errors, for the work is full of
them ; not in supplying a correct index, for the one
supplied is the most worthless specimen I know; not in
helping the reader to gauge the true value of the work,
for although the editor makes notes on almost every page
of the three volumes, he does not devote a single one of
them, not a word of his own from beginning to end, to
appreciation of the author's work. It will be asked with
incredulity what are the notes about. The crowded notes
on page after page are, almost without exception, devoted
to the graceless task of belittling and refuting Lynch and
trying to restore Giraldus whom Lynch had upset. In
the whole range of literature there is scarcely another work
so unsympathetically edited, so gracelessly spoiled. The
indefensible freak of entrusting the editing of this
important work to a sullen opponent of its author and
blind admirer of Giraldus greatly simplifies the question
— What has become of the Celtic Society? The text and
translation should be republished under the old name;
but if the notes are worth publishing they should certainly
stand in a separate volume suitably named as an attempted
refutation of Lynch. Dr. Kelly expressly admits that he
has made no special study of the subject, and that his
" opinion rests mainly on the authority of Giraldus,"
supplemented by the dogmatic assertions of Mr. O'Callag-
han. This latter authority he is obliged to reject when he
comes to treat of matters of which he himself has made
an independent study. In matters touching the liberty
of his own nation he without study or inquiry accepts
this authority, accepts the Bulls and apparently all the

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 57

libels of the Middle Ages so far as they applied to Ireland,
in opposition to the author he is translating, who had
made a special study of the subject. I invite the reader
to say is that an attitude of judicial impartiality worthy
of the subject. Please bear the answer in mind while we
proceed.

The Macarice Excidium is a sketch of the Irish part of
the war of the Revolution which drove James II. off, and
placed William III. on, the throne. It was written by
Colonel Charles 0 'Kelly who had taken part in that war
as an officer in James's service. Being thus an account
of the war at first hand, and the only one on the Jacobite
side, it is a work of considerable value with reference to
that particular war, but of none beyond that. It is said
to have been originally written in French, but the only
manuscripts of it known to exist are in Latin. Before
entering on his proper subject, the writer presents, by
way of introduction, and as conducive to a better under-
standing of his subject, a brief outline of Irish History
from an early period down to the time of the war. As
might be expected, such learning as is here displayed is
superficial and is rather that of the Pale than Irish. The
whole work is divided into short paragraphs numbered
consecutively. In one of these it is stated that Pope
Adrian, being an Englishman, had shown undue favour
to the king of his native land by improperly granting
him a Bull purporting to confer upon the king the
dominion of Ireland — a thing he had no power to confer.
Observe that this statement is founded not on the alleged
Bull itself, inconclusive as that would be, but on the
garbled traditional version of it fostered by English
colonists and officials in Ireland. This work has been
translated and edited for the Irish Archaeological Society
by Mr. J. C. O'Callaghan, and this paragraph is the peg
upon which he hangs much learning on the subject now
under consideration. His opinion, like that of Dr. Kelly,

58 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

rests mainly on the authority of Giraldus, since for the
two principal Bulls there is no other original authority.
Taking Giraldus's dose without the salutary grain of salt
gave him an appetite for more . He ransacked old pigeon-
holes for libels and hobgoblin tales on any authority, or
on none, succeeded in conjuring up a frightful picture
of the irreligious and immoral condition of mediaeval
Ireland, and worked himself into such a state of mind
that he believed it all; for what he has written on the
subject is as if written under the influence of a nightmare.
He never questions the credibility of Giraldus or of any
other witness. So long as the story is sufficiently rank
and strong he does not ask who bears it or whence it
comes. Any bearer of it is credible enough for Mr.
O'Callaghan, and with a few dogmatic sentences he affects
to settle the matter while really contributing nothing to
its elucidation. He gives no heed to the fact that not one
of these five Bulls was known in Gaelic Ireland, where,
if genuine, they should have been known, and where of
course they would have been known, communication
between Ireland and Rome having been all along frequent
and constant. Having found the group of three Bulls
which were not known in either England or Ireland until
the eighteenth century, which were certainly never
delivered to the persons to whom they were addressed,
and which our friend Giraldus never heard of, nor any
historian since, so smitten is Mr. O'Callaghan with them
because of the foul charges contained in one of them, he
actually quotes the three at full length twice over in his
notes to this single volume, the subject of which is the
Jacobite War ! Again I ask the reader to say is this
judicial impartiality, and to bear the answer in mind
while we proceed.

The Very Eev. Dr. Malone says, with good-natured
familiarity, " So much importance do I attach to Gerald
Barry's statement, that I give up Irish authorities for

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBREXSIS. 59

him." And again, " Let us refer for a moment to Gerald
Barry — no man was more competent to speak of the
privilege. He was born about 1150 ; was tutor to Prince
John ; accompanied him to Ireland, and was subsequently
bishop of St. David's. He published his Conquest of
Ireland, containing the privilege, about the year 1188,
and dedicated the latest edition of his work, in 1202, to
his former pupil King John." And he goes on demonstrat-
ing in the most satisfactory manner what a splendid
character and unimpeachable witness Giraldus is — a golden
eagle not liable to lose a feather. He never gives his
reader a hint that Giraldus was addicted to telling tales,
or the prey of an extravagant imagination, or even a
credulous listener. The importance of this magnificent
encomium arises from the necessitous condition in which
the Bulls are, depending on the evidence of this solitary
witness. Since all other persons who mention the Bulls
derive their text from this witness, the whole burden of
proof rests upon him alone, and if his credibility were
shaken all was lost. The Bulls and Giraldus' s character
for veracity must stand or fall together. Hence the
necessity for the glowing testimonial.

One feels shy to bring abruptly into close proximity
with such warm admiration and implicit faith a true ac-
count of the real Giraldus ; for no matter how considerately
stated the contrast is so violent as to seem almost rude.
When a gentleman chivalrously declares his willingness
to give up Irish, authorities for Giraldus, it seems unkind
to remind him that by doing so he would make no sacrifice
whatever, there being no Irish authorities in this matter
to be given up. But as such feelings of delicacy would
paralyse inquiry and perpetuate error, I hope to be
pardoned for taking the risk. The author of Cambrensis
Eversus, an Irishman of unquestioned honour, honesty,
and ability, having made an exhaustive study of Giraldus,
is the proper authority for an Irishman to go to for a correct

60 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

estimate of that gentleman. However, since Dr. Lynch's
avowed purpose was to refute Giraldus, and since the
matter here in question is one affecting Ireland, it will
be more manifestly and abundantly fair to quote not from
Lynch but from Englishmen of the very highest competence
who stand like Giraldus on the side of the invaders, to
quote — namely, from two of the editors of Giraldus's
complete Works published by the authority and at the
expense of the State. These gentlemen speak calmly,
with the fullest possible knowledge, and with no rickety
Bulls to uphold. A comparison of what they say will show
at a glance if there is anything unfair in my description
of Giraldus, and if we ought to " rely mainly upon
Giraldus " and " give up Irish authorities for him." In
the preface to Volume Y. of the Works, the Rev. James
Dimock says : —

" Giraldus was replete with the exact qualities, the very
reverse of what are needed to form an impartial historian.
A man of strong impetuous feelings and violent prejudices,
with a marvellously elastic self -confidence that nothing
could put down, an overflowing self-conceit that would be
deemed a mere absurd caricature if any one but himself
had depicted himself; he looked down with sublime con-
tempt upon everyone and everything that did not agree
with his own notions ; he had not an idea that anything
he thought or said could by any chance be wrong ; he could
not imagine any one who differed from him to be other
than a fool or a rogue ; ready as he was to find fault with
any one except himself, yet sometimes an unflinching
partizan, but often a virulent antagonist, he was the man
of all others whose nature rendered it simply impossible
for him to write a fair history of any sort, and least of
all of Ireland, and the Irish, and the English invaders,
with so many of his own near relatives amongst the latter.
He was, too, one of those clever, ready-witted, ready-penned
men, who are so apt to let their pens run away with them.
He dashes away, often plainly on the impulse of the
moment, and with him often a very impetuous impulse;
and there is no argument sometimes in favour of what
he is advancing too absurd for him, or too inconsistent
with what he may have said a few pages before, or may

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBREXSIS. 61

have to say a few pages after ; there is no assertion some-
times too bold, no invective against an opponent too
virulently unjust, no imputation of the basest motives too
manifestly unreasonable, and no assumption of the vilest
and most horrible calumnies as certain truths too atrocious
for him. Still he was a very fine fellow. The sin of
unscrupulous assertion and invective was a sin of the age,
and must not be laid exclusively upon him though, per-
haps, by no writer more thoroughly given way to."

In the preface to Volume VII. of the Works, Mr.
Freeman says : —

'' In estimating the historical value of any work of
Giraldus Cambrensis, we must remember the two-fold
character of the man with whom we are dealing. We are
dealing with one who was vain, garrulous, careless as to
minute accuracy, even so far careless as to truth as to be,
to say the least, ready to accept statements which told
against an enemy without carefully weighing the evidence
for them. We are dealing with one who was not very
scrupulous as to consistency, and who felt no special shame
of contradicting himself. But we are also dealing with
one of the most learned men of a learned age, with one
who, whatever we say as to the soundness of his judgment,
came behind few in the sharpness of his wits — with one
who looked with a keen, if not an impartial, eye on all
the events and controversies of his time — with one, above
all, who had mastered more languages than most men of
his time, and who had looked at : them with an approach
to a scientific view which still fewer men of his time
shared with him."

A duty sad and singular now devolves upon us. We
must divest poor Giraldus of mitre, crozier, and episcopal
purple, and deprive the Bulls of these supports so sorely
needed, but, alas, fictitious. For those who knew Giraldus
better than we do were so unkind that they never made
him a bishop. This was really too bad, and shows a
deplorable lack of consideration for people who undertake
to sustain his Bulls ; but it is rather late now to mend
the matter. Giraldus never was Bishop of St. David's
or of any other See. A mitre-hunter all his life, he never

62 THE DOUBTFUL GEANT OF IRELAND.

had the satisfaction of wearing one as a bishop. In his
writings and in his conversation he commonly boasted
that he had been offered and had rejected at different
times at least half-a-dozen mitres, namely, those of
Wexford, Leighlin, Ossory, Cashel, Bangor, and Llandaff.
But he was of opinion that only a metropolitan one would
fit him, and this or any other he never succeeded in obtain-
ing. Possibly he would have been a better man as a bishop
than he was as a priest, and according to his own account
of the Church of England and Wales in his time, it would
not have been difficult for him to excel as a bishop.
However this may 'be, a bishop he never became ; and,
at one stroke, so much of his character goes by the board.
The eagle begins to moult.

Griraldus may, without any injustice, be classed among
the superfluous priests mentioned in the first chapter, who
were not overpowered with any undue sense of the sacred-
ness and responsibility attached to Holy Orders, but appear
to have looked upon them as little more than a university
degree or a qualification for some higher office in Church
or State. He was far from being one of the worst of that
class ; and I think his faults and the faults of many of
the class were not due to inherent badness of disposition.
They had become priests in obedience not to any religious
vocation but to the necessities of the meagre civilization
of the time which offered to gentlemen few professions
or modes of living at once civil and secular. Born into
a world which contained no really appropriate sphere for
them, they adopted the best available ; and if they did not
all adorn it, some of them did, and many of them were
very far from being as vicious as their mental equipment
would have enabled them to become. Had they been
born to the fuller and more diversified civilization of
modern times, they would probably never have become
priests, but would have adopted congenial secular profes-
sions or callings in which they might have become famous

CHARACTER OF GI11ALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 63

or useful men. Under the restraint which the telegraph
imposes, Giraldus might have become a distinguished
journalist. In a world containing neither journals nor
telegraph, he was sphereless and insufficiently restrained.
As a priest, he occupied a false position, and he deserves
considerable credit for having conformed to it as well as
he did. He wanted to become a reformer, forsooth, but
was incapable of the essential preliminary of reforming
himself, or even of realising that he needed reforming.
He scourged severely with tongue and pen contemporary
churchmen whom he considered vicious ; but it detracts
somewhat from his merit when we find out that they were
mostly men against whom he had a personal grudge. Can
malice and religious zeal co-operate thus ; and if so, which
was the larger ingredient in Giraldus's motive? The
reader can solve this little problem, at leisure ; it is beyond
my reach. Giraldus also scourged ' severely the rivals of
his relatives. In this case, the religious element must
have been small. He wrote some things for the glory of
God ; but he wrote more, and his best work, for the glory
of his relatives. The promoting of his own. and their
prosperity was the supreme object of his life, and for him
men were good or bad according to their attitude on that
great question. In pursuit of his object, he found no
difficulty in being at the same moment a sort of Welsh
patriot, a flatterer of Henry II. before the public, and
in secret Henry's severest critic.

With all this I believe, and will ask the reader to
believe, that Giraldus's detestation of immorality was true
and natural, and that, to a certain extent, he would give
the vicious no quarter. We must find out where his
limits lay. Large numbers of clergymen from England
and Wales flocked to Ireland in the wake of the invaders,
ostensibly to bring back the bestial Irish to civilization
and religion, but really to share the spoils of the country
which was being ravaged. They were, for the most part,

64 THE DOUBTFUL GRAXT OF IRELAND.

such men as Giraldus would have lashed mercilessly in
England. Apparently without any ties of duty or responsi-
bility in their own country, they seem to have been free
to go where they pleased and to do what they pleased;
and many of them brought mistresses with them or found
mistresses in Dublin. They were a disgrace to the priestly
calling, and gave the utmost scandal to the Irish, whom
they professed to have come over to civilize. Here was
a pretty nest of vipers. It is said that St. Laurence
O'Toole, Archbishop of Dublin, refused to 140 of them
permission to officiate in his diocese, refused to give them
absolution, and bade them go as reserved cases to Rome
to seek absolution. Whether they all went to Rome on
this errand, or found a shorter way out of their difficulty,
we know not. In either case there is little rashness in
assuming that gentlemen of such calibre so treated had
little love for Laurence or his Irish, and would have been
only too glad to help their countrymen if they could do
so by anything so easy as the writing of libels or spurious
Bulls transferring Ireland with all it contained to their
own worthy king. Some of their letters, still extant,
breathe the most unscrupulous malevolence, and are full
of the most atrocious calumnies against the Irish bishops,
priests and laity. Little wonder, after the provocation
Laurence had given them. They had not far to seek for
moral enormities to attribute to other people. Nor should
we forget that there are to the present day people — aye,
sanctimonious people — who would write of the Irish now
just as those men did then, in spite of the fact, a thousand
times established, that in domestic morals the Irish are
the purest people in Europe. The idea that those visitors
were to lead the Irish people to " put on innocence of
morals," and were to carry out the other great purposes
enumerated in the Laudabiliter would have appeared to
them the best joke of the invasion. Probably, none of
them knew anything of that document, unless one who

CHARACTER OF GIRALDTTS CAMBRENSIS. 65

may have been concerned in its concoction. To Giraldus's
credit be it said, those men had no love for him, knowing,
as they did, that he was no sharer in their ribaldries, but
would, in England and Wales, have heartily denounced
them. But that was the limit of his consistency. In
Ireland he and they were compatriots in the enemy's
country. Accordingly, in Ireland he is silent about their
vices, though these must have been greater than in
England. He came to Ireland first in company with his
brother Philip in 1183, that is, eleven years after King
Henry's invasion. He came to Ireland again, in the suite
of Prince John, towards the end of April, 1185, and
remained in the country until the Easter of the following
year. As a courtier on tour among his kindred who were
then raiding and marauding over the country, he was
quite full of their spirit, and eager to assist and glorify
them in any way in his power. His scruples, if he had
any, were silenced by the excitement of the game. These
circumstances were not particularly favourable to the
making of deep and close observations among the Irish,
or to the formation of correct opinions regarding them.
This defect was remedied in a truly characteristic manner.
His friends introduced him to some Irish story-tellers,
and these he appears to have taken seriously. The sequel
will show how they* in their own fashion, made game of
him ; for, although a shrewd observer in some respects,
his gullibility was really astounding. During this second
trip he made notes of the tales told him and of the
observations made ; and on his return to England he wrote
from these notes, from memory and from imagination;
first the Tc>2)ographia, and later the Expugnatio. In the
latter work he records the death of St. Laurence O'Toole,
in November, 1180, at Eu, in Normandy, where he was
long detained, Giraldus says, because, when attending the
Council of Lateran at Rome, he had shown himself zealous
for his own nation, and was suspected by Henry of having

66 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

acted against the honour of his regal dignity. During
Laurence's absence the gay English clergy must have had
a pleasant time in Dublin ; and, no doubt, they were well
pleased with the exile and death of a prelate who had
been so troublesome to them. Under their charge the
people of Dublin must have made enormous strides
towards perfection. So King Henry appears to have
thought, for it was not until the September of the follow-
ing year that he was kind enough to appoint to the
Archbishopric of Dublin an Englishman named John
Cumin, a clerk in his service, who was at that time a
layman. Cumin went to Rome, where he was ordained
priest and consecrated bishop in March, 1182. On coming
back to England, so assured was he that his countrymen
were duly civilizing the bestial Irish, although, presum-
ably, he drew a revenue from Dublin, he did not trouble
himself to visit that city until August, 1184, and then
only in obedience to the King's command, and for a
political purpose. At the time of Giraldus's second visit
to Ireland, Archbishop Cumin was in Dublin. Early in
1186 at a convocation of the bishops and principal clergy
of the province, the Abbot of Baltinglass preached a
sermon, in which he strongly denounced the immorality
of the clergy who had come over from England, and said
that the Irish clergy, who had hitherto been pure, were
contracting this corruption, because it was impossible to
touch pitch without being soiled. This enraged the clergy
so alluded to, all the more because the charge was true.
They engaged Giraldus to become their spokesman ; and
three days later, duly primed and prompted, he returned
the fire, preached at the Irish bishops and priests right,
left and centre, poured upon their heads a boiling torrent
of abuse, criticised and denounced them and the "many
vices and enormities " to which he had been told they were
addicted. He should admit, he said, the exemplary and
pre-eminent chastity of the Irish priests, their rigorous

CHARACTER OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 67

and faithful observance of their religious duties, their
strict abstinence, often fasting till dusk. " But as they
devote the day to works of light, so they devote the night
to works of darkness." Observe the antithetical compensa-
tion. Giraldus would on no account lose the chance of
uttering that sentence whether true or false. It was
true to his idea of literary perfection ; and if the fact did
not correspond, then the fact was wrong. Voila tout. His
charges against the priests are general and vague, except
in the solitary matter of intemperance. He is less reserved
in dealing with the bishops, of whom he has not a good
word to say. Some of them had committed the unpardon-
able offence of thwarting his relatives. He admits that
one of them, St. Laurence O'Toole, had striven to unite
the Irish for the purpose of driving the invaders out of
the country. His chance had come to revenge such conduct
and oblige his countrymen. Accordingly he has the in-
solence to tell the bishops that they neglect every duty of
their office, and allow the most horrible enormities to
flourish unchecked under their very eyes. " The Irish
are of all nations the most ignorant of the rudiments of
Christianity; for they have never yet paid tithes nor
firsts, nor contracted marriages." "A bestial nation,
living like beasts ; " hardly within the uttermost verge of
civilization ; habitual and incorrigible thieves ; utterly
unscrupulous perjurers; living normally in incest,
adultery, and fornication. Not an instance does he give,
not a shred of evidence does he adduce, but hurls his foul
charges against the whole Irish nation indiscriminately,
knowing perfectly well that the greatest moral deliquents
were like himself, strangers, and that if honest Irishmen
had their own property his friends would have had none.
Again turning more especially upon the bishops, the dead
as well as the living, he says — " There has never been one
of them found to shed his blood for Christ's Church, which
•Christ has founded with His precious blood. Hence all

68 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

the saints of the country are confessors and no martyrs ;
a thing difficult to find in any other Christian kingdom.
Hence the extraordinary fact that among a cruel and
bloodthirsty people the faith was founded and has always
remained lukewarm, and there is no crown of martyrdom
for the Church of Christ." His explanation of this extra-
ordinary fact is, that there never was anyone in Ireland
willing to shed his blood for the Church ; " not even one."
It is hard to know whether one should be amused, dis-
gusted, or angry with a man who allows himself to talk
in this manner. He says the bishops and clergy were
indignant, " and many heads arose in the assembly in
insult and protest." He seems to have thought that the
Irish bishops, failing to get anybody to kill them, ought
to have committed suicide. The people who did not kill
their bishops were bloodthirsty. The man who said so
would not have risked his smallest finger for all the bishops
and people in Ireland. All this only shows us that even
saints are not so wise before the event as after; for, of
course, it is clear that if St. Patrick had known what was
coming he would have waited to take lessons from this
tourist on stilts.

At that convocation the bishops and clergy, under the
presidency of an Englishman, Archbishop Cumin, adopted
some twenty canons or resolutions. These relate almost
exclusively to ecclesiastical matters, and so far from reveal-
ing moral enormities of the Irish, they amount to a
refutation on the highest authority of the insults of
Giraldus and a declaration that some of the strangers were
bad men, and that the urgent need of the time was not to
reform the Irish but to save them from contamination.
One of the resolutions declares that the Irish clergy had
always been eminent for their chastity, and that it would
be disgraceful of the Archbishop were he to allow them to
be corrupted by the contagion of strangers. — Ware's
History of the J3isJioj)s, p. 317. It is clear that the voice-

CHARACTER OF GIRALDUS CAMBREXSIS. 69

less laity must be allowed to share in this vindication.
Few of them can have been aware of the slanders ; they
must have felt veiy indifferent to them ; and were it other-
wise they had no organization to defend their character.
When charges jointly made against both orders are refuted
by the order which is capable of reply, the order having
no such capability must in justice be allowed to share in
the vindication. And this is to say, in other words, that
the charges were false.

On the absence of martyrs, Giraldus records in another
place the retort of the Archbishop of Cashel, " a learned
and discrete man," to a certain busybody who was pester-
ing him about the moral depravity of the Irish people
and their want of martyrs. The ; Archbishop humbly
admitted that Ireland's martyrless condition was inexcus-
able, but pleaded that now, a race who knew how to make
martyrs having come into the country, the Irish would
probably soon learn the art.

On the evening of the day on which our author so
scandalously overshot the mark, John, Archbishop of
Dublin, dining with Felix, Bishop of Ossory, asked the
latter what he thought of Giraldus's sermon. " He said
many bad things very cleverly," answered the Bishop.
" He called us drunkards. Certainly it was with difficulty
I restrained myself from immediately flying at him, or,
at the very least, retaliating sharply in words." Giraldus
had a narrow escape on that occasion. To most people it
will always be matter for regret that the pious Bishop
Felix succeeded in restraining himself, and did not give
Giraldus in the flesh what he so richly deserved. By doing
so he might have rendered a distinct service to Giraldus
by rousing his slumbering conscience, and, perhaps, to
posterity also by killing in the shell Bulls and libels then
a-hatching. His knowledge of Ireland's true condition
was actual personal knowledge, and his interest in her
was of the deepest, while .Giraldus was merely a prejudiced

70 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

or indifferent stranger, speaking from a brief and making-
a brilliant use of a tu quoque argument. Can anyone
doubt what would have been the reply of the pious Felix
if he had been asked to " rely mainly upon Giraldus,"
and to " give up Irish authorities for him " ?

Giraldus was not a man to compose and recite a brilliant
paper, and then destroy it merely because the charges it
contained were in part false and in part absurd. The
world was entitled to know what its greatest genuis had
said on a critical occasion; and, instead of feeling shame
or tendering an apology, he inserts a 'precis of his dis-
graceful sermon, with slight variations, in four of his
works, in order that no reader of his shall miss it. The
Bulls, which are our main object, he inserts in the Liber
de Principis Instructione, Distinction 2, chapter 19 ; in
the Liber de Rebus a se Gestis, Book 2, chapter 11 ; and
in the Expugnatio Hibernica, Book, 2, chapter 5 ; and in
each of these cases — observe — he gives the Bulls in
immediate connection with the libellous matter supplied
to him for his insolent philippic just described. The same
matter he also repeats in the Topogra^)hia Hibernica*
Although not one of Giraldus's works is edifying, even
when his subject is religious, they are all interesting, and
it would be easy and amusing to prove by quotations from
them, one by one, that in not one of them was he fettered
by the requirements of truth. In this way such a case of
self-contradiction, falsehood, and absurdity might be made
out on his own authority, as few other authors, ancient or
modern, would yield. Having regard to the reader'^
patience, a brief examination of the works just named,
will probably afford as much light as our purpose needs,
and as Giraldus's character will bear.

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 71

CHAPTER IY.

Works of Giraldus Cambrensis.

EDITORS and commentators alike, whatever their views of
the so-called Bulls, agree in holding that Giraldus is the
first authority for their existence and for their text, that
before him no writer mentions them, and that all con-
temporary and subsequent writers derive their text from
some one of his works, most of them from the Expugnatio.
All the copies given by other writers are more or less
imperfect and incomplete, as are also the copies in the
Expugnatio. The fullest copies are those in the Liber de
Principis Instructione, from which I have quoted them.
Of this work Giraldus himself says (Works, Vol. I., page
423) that it was one of the earliest written by him,
although not finished until late in life. Here then we
stand nearest to, if not at, the source of these two Bulls.
Beyond this work from which I have quoted them no man
has ever traced them. The work is expressly designed
as a moral and didactic treatise for the guidance of princes
and prelates of all time, explaining the virtues and manners
that best fit them, the vices that most misfit them, and how
they should be trained for their intended stations. It is
divided into three books, parts, or as the author calls
them " Distinctions." As usual with Giraldus, he does
not adhere to his declared purpose beyond the first Dis-
tinction. It consists of moral rules and reflections. Some
are original, but most are drawn from Scripture and from
a very wide range of secular authors. The remaining two
Distinctions purport to illustrate the application of the
abstract rules contained in the first, to Henry, his sons,

72 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

and other princes and public personages of that time,
with a result in most cases so unfavourable that it then
appears as if a severe criticism of those princes had been
the author's real design. In this way the work becomes
to some extent a contemporary history, and it contains
some historical facts not to be found elsewhere, inter-
spersed with graphic personal sketches of the various
princes. These sketches and the second and third Distinc-
tions which contain them are so candid that it would not
have been prudent for Griraldus to publish them until the
more dangerous personages so dealt with were dead or
disabled. For this reason he held them back for many
years, and published the first Distinction by itself with
the following note at the end of it : —

" But as for the two Distinctions following, which treat
of the success and glory of a certain prince of our own
time, and of the subsequent fall of the same prince into
ignominy, these are not yet fully and finally written and
polished, and it seemed advisable therefore that, while
the tempest rages and gathers force, they should in the
meantime remain in hiding, and keep themselves from
the touch, sight, and hearing of all, that so, existing as
though they existed not, they may await a safer and
serener season for going out into public, until the clouds
and mists be dispelled and a brighter and clearer sun
illumine the face of heaven and the surface of the earth."

Throughout the second and third Distinctions "tyrant"
is the usual term applied to Henry ; and he is repeatedly
and scornfully described as a man married to the divorced
wife of the King of France, and notwithstanding this and
the existence of offspring, still continuing to live a life of
immorality notorious to all Europe, and so conducting
himself that his wife and sons had been driven to revolt
against him. One short extract will best convey Giraldus's
secret opinion of Henry : —

"He was from the beginning to the very end an
oppressor of the nobility; weighing right and wrong,

WORKS OF GIKALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 73

lawful and unlawful, according to his own interest; a
seller and delayer of justice ; in speech changeable and
crafty; a ready breaker, not of his word only, but of his
pledged honour and of his oath ; a public adulterer, an
ingrate towards God, and destitute of devotion ; a hammer
of the Church, and a son born for destruction."

He describes an occasion on which Henry, in a fit of
ungovernable rage, set fire to the city of his birth, then
marched away till he came to a height, looked back upon
the smoking ruin which himself had wrought, rebuked
God for having deprived him of the city he loved' and
vowed that in revenge he would cheat God of his own soul.
Cardinal Vivianus, whom Henry had alternately fawned
upon and imprisoned, and who knew Henry well, says,
" never did I witness this man's equal in lying." A living
genuine historian says : —

. " The tenor of Henry's life was totally at variance with
the religious zeal which he occasionally assumed to further
his political objects. Personally stained with the foulest
crimes, condemned by the Church, he had not only
threatened Pope Alexander to recognise the antipope, but
had even declared that he would turn Mussulman ; and
having thus carried his point with the weak Pontiff,
boasted publicly that he held the Holy See in his purse."
— Gilbert's History of the Viceroys, page 26.

The interjected remark attributing weakness to Alexander
is probably no more than an obiter dictum, not to be taken
as a deliberate judgment, the author's immediate subject
being not Alexander's character but Henry's. Alexander's
many condemnations of Henry, and indeed all his letters,
exhibit vigilance, vigour, and independence ; and on the
difficult subject of antipopes, in which Henry was by no
means faithful to him, he displayed for many years, in
opposition to a powerful Catholic Emperor, courage, firm-
ness, charity, and consistency, which at length prevailed,
and which entitle him to the greatest respect. All credible
witnesses who knew Henry when living, and all who have

74 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

studied him in documents since, are in substantial agree-
ment with. Giraldus's description of him, especially in
giving him unstinted credit for duplicity; and the facts-
of his life, as recorded in the cold pages of history, render
any other view of him impossible. He was wholly
unscrupulous, but able and ambitious, and, therefore, not
wholly bad in practice. Statecraft sometimes induced him
to do what virtue and moral motives induced better men
to do. Ambition was his sole inspiration, policy his sole
conscience, now impelling, now restraining him. And
while Giraldus had his candid description locked up ready
to launch as soon as Henry was dead, he was one of the
most ardent postulants for favours at the hands of the
living Henry, and accepted all the favours he succeeded
in obtaining, regretting that they were not more. He had
flattered Henry in the Expugnatio already published as
" another Solomon," " a king fired with a great desire for
the glory of God's Church, and of the Christian religion,"
"our "Western Alexander," "truly king and conqueror,
controlling his wrath with bravery, restraining his anger
with modesty." In the same work, it is true, he credits
Henry with an ample share of vices ; but he does it with
such modifications, and in such an atmosphere of greatness,
that it involves no risk.

Whoever makes statements essentially contradictory of
each other disentitles himself to be heard, especially if
in each case he makes them, as Giraldus did, with the
object of gaining personal advantage. "Frequently and
copiously he flatters the living Henry, praises him as a
king in every respect extraordinary in the world, and,
as he says, most eminent in wisdom, piety, courage, justice,
learning, love of peace, clemency towards all, never known
to desire or encroach upon what belonged to another. Yet
in many other works published by Giraldus after Henry's
death he execrates the memory of that king and pursues-
him with a most virulent pen."— White's Apologia, p. 1.

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 75

The second Distinction, chapter 19, contains the two
Bulls as quoted by me, and a statement to the effect that
they had been formally published at a synod of bishops
held in Waterford in 1175. The second and third Dis-
tinctions contain accounts of many visions vouchsafed to-
Henry, to Giraldus, and to others, and numerous quota-
tions from the prophecies of Merlin Celidon, with examples
of their fulfilment.

The Liber de Rebus a se Gestis is a sort of autobiography.
The author tells so much about himself in all his works,
that this special book on that subject consists for the most
part of extracts from the others ; or perhaps it is the block
of which passages in the others are chips. He kept a
draft of it written up like a diary, from youth onwards,
but did not reduce it to its present form until late in life.
Since he had already confided most of its contents to the
world in other works, there was little occasion for it,,
except for the purpose of bringing the facts and fancier
of his life more closely together, and emphasizing his own
importance. The work is divided into three books, and
is sprinkled with anecdotes, visions, and the prophecies
of Merlin Celidon. Chapter XI. of Book 2 contains the
Bull Lauddbiliter without comment. The immediately
succeeding chapters summarise the author's abusive sermon
in Dublin. Having acquired an extensive knowledge of
vice in his own country, he found the Irish a convenient
people to whom he might attribute the worst he knew,
and with regard to whom he might accept without ques-
tion, and repeat without remorse, the most scandalous
tales. This consideration and his craving for a set-off to
their real virtues, would have been ample motive for
Giraldus without any special antipathy. But the Bishops
had supplied a further incentive in daring to throw any
obstacles in the way of his friends. The Irish people,
it is true, were far too submissive, and were on that ac-
count entitled to charity and not slander from him ; but

76 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

ihis view overlooks the difficulty, rarely surmounted, of
pardoning people whom your brothers and cousins are
actually engaged in plundering, especially if you are of a
poetic temperament and desire that posterity should sing
the praises of the successful plunderers. Nemo sibi esse
judex vel suis jus dicere debet. When writing of things
he knows, Giraldus gives specific details. In no place
would he more willingly give them than here. This fact,
coupled with his omission to name any immoral Irishman,
or to give any particulars which could have been tested
even at the time he wrote, goes to show that he spoke
either from fancy or from vague information which could
not be subjected to examination, and leaves us entitled
to infer that the Irish of that day were as true to the
spirit, if not to the letter, of Christian ethics as their
ancestors had been centuries before, and as their descendants
are to-day.

The Expugnatio Hibernica is the best written of all
Giraldus's works, and opens with seriousness and solemnity.
It is the work which both Dr. Malone and Mr. Dimock
had chiefly in mind when writing the contradictory
opinions quoted in the third chapter. It seems to have
been Giraldus's ambition to write a prose epic or historical
novel based on the invasion and conquest of Ireland by
the Anglo- Normans. This would have been a creditable
ambition. But its execution was not possible to him. He
stood too near the events, and had too close an interest
in the actors on one side. His mind was too small and
biassed to allow, even for the sake of poetic justice, that
any Irishman could be a hero ; and to make heroes of his
own brothers and kindred, without any worthy opponent,
was as impossible poetically as it was untrue historically.
No struggle, no hero. He has no Irish hero, unless we are
to consider Dermot, the traitor, as one. Had he a spark
of the generous fire of poetry in him, he would have made
a hero of O'Rourke, Prince of Breifny, and thereby given

WORKS OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 77

some verisimilitude to his praises of his own relatives.
Instead of doing so he alleges, on the flimsiest grounds,
that O'Rourke attempted to act treacherously towards
Hugh de Laci at a colloquy on the Hill of Ward. The
Four Masters say it was de Laci who attempted the
treachery, and succeeded. Be that as it may, it was
O'Rourke' s head that was on that occasion severed from
his body, taken to Dublin, and placed over the Castle
gate. His compatriots having thus the material advantage
and nothing more to fear from O'Rourke, Giraldus had a
chance of doing justice to O'Rourke, whose character wa&
worthy to adorn an epic. This was more than he could
afford.

This is how he treats Dermot MacMurrough to whom
he and his owed everything. He says that after a certain
battle in Ossory a trophy of human heads was piled up
in honour of Dermot; that Dermot turned them over
one by one in excessive glee, and jumped up in the air
three times with his hands clasped. Then recognising
one of the heads as that of a man whom he had hated
in life, he held it up by the ears and hair and tore off the
nose and lips with his teeth. That was Giraldus's con-
ception of an Irish hero. Needless to say, he did not
derive this horrible story from any Irish source. Em-
bittered against Dermot as the Irish chroniclers of the
time were, and ready as they were to say the hardest
things of him, they record nothing of this ghastly
occurrence. It remained to be written by a camp-follower
of the tribe to whom Dermot had betrayed his country,
and is a good specimen of the traitor's reward. And,
although Dermot was well known to be a bad man and the
leader of a bad, immoral, and unjust cause, that did not
prevent Giraldus's uncle, the Bishop of St. David's, from
espousing that cause.

Imperfect as was Giraldus's conception of his task, he
did not adhere to it beyond the first book. The remainder

78 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

consists of patches hurriedly sewn together, not a uniform
web. The whole result of his effort is a congeries of
brilliant fragments which might have formed part of a
fine work, but could never of themselves have formed a
symmetrical whole. The promised epic becomes a mere
one-sided political pamphlet, acquiring by its brilliant
extravagance the character of romance. He provides
Greek epithets for his soldiers — Stephanides, Morcardides,
Giraldides, etc. — just as Vigil does in the ^iEneid, and he
makes his heroes address their men and one another in
those terms. Their imaginary speeches occupy consider-
able space. Though his heroes are all on one side, they
do not receive even treatment. He draws a sharp distinc-
tion between his relatives and their rivals, and weighs
their respective merits in very different scales. In this
work he states repeatedly that King Henry regarded with
disfavour all the proceedings in Ireland before his own
arrival ; and in the nineteenth chapter of the first book
he says that, early in 1170

•/ «/

" An edict was issued by the King of the English that
no ship should on any account sail with hostile intent to
Hibernia from any part of his dominions, and that every
man of those who had already gone there should either
return before the approaching Easter, or be disinherited
from their lands and made exiles from his kingdom for
«ver."

Henry doubted the loyalty of the first irregular invaders,
but Giraldus should have told us, if he could, how this
conduct of Henry's can be reconciled with the soliciting
of Bulls and a burning desire to act upon them.

After describing Henry's proceedings in Ireland, to
which we shall presently return, Giraldus says that Henry
left Ireland in April, 1172, having spent only six months
in the country, and not having extended his sway over the
whole of it. News had come to him at the same moment
that his sons were conspiring or in open rebellion against

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 79

Mm, and that two Cardinals, Albertus and Theodinus,
had come into Normandy, sent by Pope Alexander III.,
to hold an investigation regarding Henry's complicity in
the murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury : —

" They were reputed to be just and good men, faithfully
chosen for this special purpose, but still Romans ; and
unless the king hurried to them, his whole kingdom and
-all his territories might be placed under interdict."

Henry hurried off, and on his way slept one night at
Oardiff, where he had a vision, Giraldus says. A spirit,
in the garb of a Teutonic monk, stood before him, and
called upon him to enforce a more strict observance of
the Sabbath in his dominions, promising him in return
rich reward. In the introduction to the second book we
are told that Henry had many other visions and premoni-
tions, more fully set forth in the de Principis Instructione,
thus proving that the last-named work was already written.
We are favoured with many visions of Giraldus' s own,
also those of his brothers, and informed that the Anglo-
Norman soldiers saw a phantom army in Ossory — a thing
of frequent occurrence in Ireland. The application and
fulfilment of the prophecies of Merlin Celidon are care-
fully pointed out step by step, and we are told that John
de Courci, in his campaign in Ulster, owed his success
on one decisive occasion to the dissemination by him of
a prophecy of St. Columbkille to the effect that he was to
be the victor. This story is true, but Professor Eugene
O'Curry has shown, in his Manuscript Materials, that
the prophecy in question was made as well as disseminated
by de Courci, or by Giraldus for him. Giraldus enumerates
five grounds on which the King of England was entitled
to the sovereignty of Ireland. In another work he
enumerates a different set of grounds. That did not
matter: a highway robber could state five grounds,
perhaps ten, on which he was entitled to your purse. This

80 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

work is also enriched with brief accounts of certain wonder*
more fully set forth in the TopograpMa; and that work
is here defended against the attacks of critics. How?
By the observation that it contains no tales more wonderful
than those to be found in the Bible ! Out of such materials
a brilliant writer can make an entertaining book, but not
history. When this is the nature of what he calls his.
serious and solemn work, it may be judged what a free
pen he wielded when the restraint of seriousness was
absent.

Apart from producing copies of the Bulls in the three
works now noticed, the only important statement Giraldus
makes about them is that they were formally published
at a Synod of Bishops held in Waterford in 1175. Writers
in the English interest at that time have a superfluity
of " Synods of Bishops " in Ireland : and to those who
accept their statements it appears to be of no importance
that the Irish Bishops had no knowledge of some of the
alleged Synods. To constitute one of their Synods of
Bishops, it was sufficient for King Henry to send an
Englishman as Bishop to the See of Waterford or of
Dublin, and with him another Englishman, at once
Bishop and politician, as inductor. Two being plural,
there was nothing to prevent their holding a " Synod of
Bishops" in their drawingroom. There was no occasion
to invite the old-fashioned Bishops of Ireland to attend,
especially as the proceedings were likely to be more
harmonious without them. A document published at such
a Synod might, so far as the Irish people were concerned,
as well have been published in England or in Aquitaine,
or might as well not have been published at all. Such
a publication would be a manifest farce. In this way
some of the later alleged Synods of Bishops must be ac-
counted for; while some of the earlier are pure fiction,
devoid of even this shadowy foundation.

Roger de Hovenden was a grave chronicler, whose

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 81

authority is accepted for many things for which there is
no other authority. He had the advantage over Giraldus
of having been in King Henry's service as secretary at
the time of the invasion of Ireland. "Writing an account
of Henry's progress, immediately after landing in Ireland,
he says : —

" On the fifteenth of the Kalends of November, the
festival of St. Luke the Evangelist, himself and all his
army proceeded to Waterford, an episcopal city, and he
found there William Fitz Aldelin, his dapifer (provider
for his table), Robert Fitz Bernard, and others of his
household, whom he had sent before him from England.
And he delayed there during fifteen days. And there
came thither to him, by his order, the King of Cork, the
King of Limerick, the King of Ossory, the King of Meath,
Reginald of Waterford, and almost all the powerful men
of Hibernia, except the King of Connaught, who said that
he himself was, by right, King and Lord of the whole of
Hibernia. Furthermore, there came thither to the King
of England, all the Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots
of the whole of Hibernia, and they accepted him as King
and Lord of Hibernia, swearing to him and to his heirs,
fealty and the right to rule over them for ever. Following
the example of the clergy, the aforesaid kings and princes
of Hibernia accepted in a similar manner Henry King
of England as King and Lord of Hibernia, and became
his men, and swore fealty to him and to his heirs against
all men."

He then sets out the names of the four Archbishops,
attempts to do the same for the twenty-eight bishops,
but breaks down, and repeats: — "All these, both Arch-
bishops and Bishops, accepted King Henry of England
and his heirs, as Kings and Lords of Hibernia for ever,
an act which they confirmed by surrendering their
charters to him." It would be difficult to find a statement
more explicit and convincing than this of a grave writer,
who was in a position to know the facts. What is there to
be said on it? So little foundation is there for saying

that all the Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots of Ireland

G

82 THE DOUBTFUL GEANT OF IB.ELAND.

visited Waterford, separately or collectively, in November,
1171, that those most willing to sustain the statement,
if possible, simply abandon it as substantially untrue,
and do not wish to be questioned about Roger de Hovenden
or his assembly of Bishops. Henry had landed at the
head of a magnificent army of Continental veterans,
armed and armoured in a manner never before seen in
Ireland. The leaders of the irregular invaders and the
Irish princes within his reach, understanding at once
that he was not to be trifled with, and not being madmen,
came and submitted to him. Some few Bishops and
Abbots of the adjacent districts acted similarly in their
individual capacity, without power or pretence to bind
anyone but themselves. The princes of Ulster and other
distant parts of the country made no move either to sustain
Roderick O'Connor, or to acknowledge Henry Plantagenet.
No Archbishop, Bishop or Abbot, beyond Henry's immedi-
ate reach, waited upon Henry at Waterford, nor did all
within his reach. Those who did wait upon him had no
charters to surrender. All this is now common ground
no longer in dispute, and the elaborate statement, based
on such frail material, is tacitly abandoned as substantially
untrue. We are, therefore, not called upon to prove its
untruth afresh, especially as it is not alleged that the
Bulls were published on that occasion. But we are entitled
to ask for what purpose was it written ? For what purpose
did Roger specifically name, or try to name, thirty-two
prelates, representing every district from end to end of
Ireland, and say, and repeat, that all these came to Water-
ford and swore allegiance to Henry, the fact being, that
most of them never saw Henry in their lives, and never
tried to see him ? The question does not admit of discus-
sion. The purpose of the statement, whether original or
hearsay, was to help the cause of the invaders, and to
help it at the expense of truth. And if a grave and
responsible writer felt at liberty for that purpose to body

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 83

forth, from shadow and imagination one complete assembly
of Bishops, how was an imaginative and confessed dreamer
to distinguish himself if not by recording three or four
Synods? Accordingly, Giraldus has (1) a "Synod of
Bishops " in Armagh in 1170 ; (2) a " Council of Bishops "
in Cashel in 1172 ; (3) a " Synod of Bishops " in Waterford
in 1175; and (4) a "Synod of Bishops" in Dublin in
1177.

(1) He is vague as to the date of this, and gives no
particulars of who were present or who presided. In
Labbe's Collection of Sacred Councils, Giraldus's vague
statement is copied verbatim without a word in addition,
but with this very curious heading : " SYNOD or WATER-
FORD, held in Hibernia, about the year of Our Lord, 1158 ;
from the Expugnaiio Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis,
chapter 18." Giraldus is, therefore, the sole authority for
it. His text places it among the events of 1170, and at
Armagh. A vague Synod on his sole authority, and un-
fixed in time and place, does not call for further
consideration.

(2) The Synod of Cashel is the only one with regard to
which. Giraldus states by whom it was called, who attended,
who presided, and sets forth the resolutions arrived at.
The contrast will be best shown by an outline of his state-
ments, although some of them cannot be accepted,
especially the first. He says that early in 1172, the
island having been reduced to silence by the presence of
King Heniy, " the King, fired with a great desire for the
glory of God's Church and of the Christian religion,"
summoned a Council at Cashel, that this Council was
presided over by the Pope's Legate Christian [ = Criostan
O'Conarchy], Bishop of Lismore, and that the following
Archbishops with their suffragan bishops and certain
other ecclesiastics of their provinces were present : —
Donatus [ = Domnall O'Huallachain], Archbishop of
Cashel; Laurencius [ = Lorcan O'Toole], Archbishop of

84 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Dublin; Catholicus [ = Chadhla O'Duffy], Archbishop of
Tuam. There were also present on behalf of Henry,
Radulfus, or Ealph, Abbot of Buildwas ; Radulfus,
Archdeacon of Llandaff; Nicholas, one of Henry's chap-
lains ; and some other clergymen. He then devotes an
entire chapter to the constitutions or decrees agreed to
by the council, each of which he explains at some length.
They fall under the following heads: — (a) marriages;
(b) baptisms ; (c) tithes ; (d) immunity of church property
from tax and every secular exaction ; (e) immunity of the
clergy from eric and other fines ; (/") the making of wills ;
(g] funeral services ; and also, he says, some decrees aimed
at bringing the Irish Church into conformity with the
Anglican in matters of discipline.

On his account of this Synod we have to observe, first,
the absence of Gelasius [ = Gilla-Isa Mac Laig], Arch-
bishop of Armagh. Henry and his friends felt this ; it
is evidently a sore point with Giraldus, and he proceeds
to take out satisfaction after his manner by raising a
laugh at the Primate —

" The Primate of Armagh was not present then on
account of feebleness of body and great age ; but he after-
wards came to Dublin and placed his approval of all things
at the King's disposition. By common repute a holy man,
he brought about with him wherever he went a white
cow, whose milk alone he used."

The Primate was old, but not so feeble as is here represen-
ted. In 1171 he made an extended visitation of Ulster,
and in 1172 he presided as Primate over an assembly of
the Connaught clergy. A man able to do this could have
easily gone to Cashel if so disposed. If he went to Dublin,
it was an act of courtesy; for Henry had acquired no
control over him or his district. Secondly, we have to
observe the fulness and explicitness of the account as
compared with the few vague sentences in which he dis-

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 85

poses of the other alleged Synods. If on one side of this
contrast his details are to be taken as proof that he had
before him an official record of the acts of the Synod, it
must follow with equal force that in the other cases he
had no such record, and gives us nothing better than the
rumours of interested persons. To maintain that details
indicate genuineness is to admit that their absence indi-
cates spuriousness. Thirdly, although his information
with regard to the Cashel Synod must have been derived
from minutes of the proceedings or a report drawn up
for King Henry by the Englishmen present at the Synod,
there are no shocking moral enormities revealed nor any-
thing worse than what well might have to be considered
by a Synod in any country in Europe in any age. Lastly,
the report contains not a word about the Laudabiliter,
nor does Giraldus mention it in connection with this
Synod.

According to the foregoing indications, that of Cashel
is the only genuine Synod Giraldus records. It was held
while Henry was present in Ireland. That it was a most
appropriate occasion for publishing a Bull on his behalf
is self-evident. So favourable to him is the Laudabiliter,
and so manifestly useful would its publication at that
Synod have been to him, one would almost expect him to
insist upon its publication there even if it were spurious ;
while, if genuine, the urgent moral need of the Irish,
Henry's burning zeal for their conversion and for the
glory of God and of the Church, and the warm approval
of the Pope, would have made the publication of the
Laudabiliter on that occasion a duty incumbent on Henry
and on the ecclesiastics who represented him. It was
not mentioned at all. The Pope's Legate Avas in the chair.
Had the Laudabiliter been genuine he would have been
made aware of its existence long before* and the formal
publication of it while Henry was present in the country
would have formed part, and, from Henry's point of view,

86 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

the most important part, of the proceedings. But if that
document was spurious, or not yet " written and polished,"
the Legate necessarily knew nothing of it ; and it was
more prudent for Henry to leave him so than to court
exposure. It would be childish to urge that Henry had
a genuine Bull and forgot it; but supposing that silly
plea were tenable, the ecclesiastics present on his behalf
might be trusted not to forget a matter in their own
department and of capital importance to him and them.
To remember his interest in this respect was precisely
their business there. How could they remember a State
Paper which perhaps they had never seen? Ah! the
gentlemen who ask this question forget their own argu-
ments. They are the same who tells us that the Laudabi-
liter had been read in England, sixteen years before, at
an assembly of notables. They are the same who tell us
that an assertion of its existence had been for thirteen
years before the world in the Metalogicus which these
ecclesiastics must be taken to have read. On which side
stands the difficulty now? My contention is that the
reading before the notables is mythical, that the state-
ment now at the end of the Metalogicus was placed there
subsequently by a strange hand, and that the Laudabiliter
was not read at Cashel for the simple reason that nobody
at that Synod knew it existed. No one has ever claimed
that it was read there ; and Giraldus's statement in the
next paragraph is tantamount to an assertion that it was
not.

(3) We have proof that Henry and his representatives
at Cashel were fully conscious of the value such an instru-
ment as the Laudabiliter would be to them, and, therefore,
that it was not through forgetfulness, but by design it
was neither read nor mentioned at Cashel. In Chapter
5 of Book 2, Giraldus says that Henry sent messengers
to Pope Alexander III. with letters drawn up at the
Synod of Cashel, and took advantage of the opportunity

WORKS OP GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 87

to ask the Pope's approval and authority for subduing
the Irish people, and bringing the Church in Ireland
under the same rules and discipline as 'the Anglican
Church. He does not say who the messengers were or
what was the nature of the letters they bore. He then
proceeds : —

" The privilege was accordingly sent into Ireland per
Nicholas, then Prior of Wallingford, afterwards for a
time Abbot of Malmesbury, and William Fitz Aldelin ;
and a Synod of Bishops having been immediately called
at Waterford, the same privilege was solemnly read in
the public hearing with universal approval. Also another
privilege sent per the same persons, which the same king
had obtained from Alexander's predecessor, Pope Adrian,
through John of Salisbury, afterwards Bishop of Chartres,
who had been sent to Rome for that special purpose.
Through whom also the same Pope presented to the King
of the English a gold ring in sign of investiture; and
this ring was immediately, together with the privilege,
placed in the archives of Winchester."

He does not specify the date of this Synod, but makes
the statement in the part of his narrative dealing with
1175. There is no mention of any Synod at this date in
Labbe, Wilkins, or Migne. Cardinal Moran says that he
has been unable to discover a particle of evidence that any
Synod or Council whatsoever was held in Waterford in
1175, and that it is a myth. No evidence having since
been produced, beyond what he had before him, we may
conclude that there is none. No one in Ireland at the
time knew anything of the alleged Synod. It remained
for Giraldus to come ten years later and discover that it
had been held. Had there been genuine documents to
publish at an Irish Synod on Henry's behalf, he would
have taken care to have them published at as large and
representative an assembly as he could gather, so that
all men might know ; and the Pope's representative, then
in Ireland, would have been connected with the proceed-

88 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

ings, or at least aware of them. Had a Synod of that
character been held, and made the occasion of an important
proclamation, there would be no need to grope for it;
the event would be writ large, and some authoritative
record of it would remain for reference. There has never
been a record of it, nor a reference by the English in
Ireland to it, or to such a record. It seems to be another
of those cases in which admirers of these Bulls claim
publicity and secrecy at the same time. This is the only
publication claimed for either of the two Bulls ; though
to be genuine, the Laudabiliter should have been written
twenty years before. During all that time the Pope had
a representative in Ireland who knew nothing about that
document ; and now it is published without him at a
Synod of Bishops, not one of whom is named, and not a
trace of whose proceedings remains. What is classed as
the principal privilege is that of Alexander, and it is
so classed by the author, who says that it was thought by
some to be spurious. There is a certain appropriateness
in assigning to a spurious Synod, the promulgation of
spurious documents.

(4) Among Giraldus's records, under 1177, is this
entry : —

" Meanwhile Vivianus, performing the function of Legate
through Hibernia, called a Synod of Bishops in Dublin,
publicly proclaimed viva voce the sovereignity of the King
of the English in Hibernia, and its confirmation by the
Supreme Pontiff ; strictly directing and enjoining upon
both the clergy and the laity, under threat of anathema,
not to presume with daring rashness to withdraw in any
respect from their fealty to him."

The holding of this Synod is briefly acknowledged by
the Four Masters. There is nothing about it in Labbe's
Collection, but Wilkins includes it in his Councils of Great
Britain and Ireland, merely copying Giraldus's statement,
and adding a note from Hovenden, not confirming that

WORKS OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 89

statement, but saying that Henry had arrested Cardinal
Vivian when passing through England for having come
into his dominions without asking his permission, and
only let him go on his swearing that he would do nothing
opposed to Henry's interests. If the alleged Synod was
really held, we may observe with regard to it, that Giraldus
says nothing about the Bulls having been read or men-
tioned on that occasion, though the purpose he attributes
to Cardinal Vivian is the same as that which the Bulls
profess. In Haverty's history it is stated, on the authority
of the passage just quoted, that Cardinal Vivian insisted
on the obligation of observing those Bulls. Father Morris
maintains that the passage does not bear that interpreta-
tion, and that Cardinal Vivian knew nothing whatever
about the alleged Bulls. Mr. Haverty proceeds to say of
Vivian —

" He was probably induced by the English functionaries
to take this step, as it does not appear that he had any
commission from the Pope to do so."

That is to say, if Vivian did take any such action, it was
political action, taken on his own personal initiation, and
in what he considered the interests of peace and order.
On this, I am of opinion — (1) That Vivian took no such
action, because he knew that much the larger part of
Ireland had not yet submitted to the invaders, and was
in no mood to do so, and to threaten with his own
anathemas the clergy and laity of that larger part for
attempting a thing he knew they were absolutely deter-
mined to continue doing w^ould be ridiculous. (2) Had
the Bulls been genuine, Cardinal Vivian, coming to the
country a latere, would have been in full possession of
them, would have come to proclaim them with greater
force than that of his own voice, and would not have been
arrested by Henry on the way. (3) Had he done this,
Giraldus would have been delighted to state expressly a
fact so agreeable to him. This Giraldus has not done.

90

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Before finally dismissing the Expugnatio, we may as
well observe one or two more of the many instances in
which Giraldus entangles himself, and all who believe
him, in a snare of his own contriving. He says that
Henry and the invaders were animated by a disinterested
desire to reform the Irish and collect Peter's Pence for
the Pope. Henry while in Ireland, and after going away,
distributed amongst his favourites charters of lands in
Ireland then in the undisputed possession of their Irish
owners. These charters were practically licences to the
donees to attack the owners of those lands by force and
fraud ad libitum and thus to acquire the lands if they
could. Force and fraud were practised, in some cases
successfully, in other cases unsuccessfully. This was what
the invaders meant by reforming the Irish — reforming
them out of their property. And Giraldus in substance
asks us to believe that this policy of pillage and plunder
was carried on in pursuance of an inspiration from God
and authority from the Pope, and that the Pope was to
share in the booty. They are pretty documents for the
proof of which this blasphemous theory is essential. It
is, I need scarcely say, an absolute historical certainty
that the Pope never received a penny from the Irish
through the invaders.

Again, Giraldus says that St. Laurence O'Toole strove
to unite the Irish for the purpose of expelling the invaders,
and that Henry regarded Laurence with distrust and had
him detained an exile in Normandy until he died there.
If Laurence was then opposed to the presence of the
invaders, as he undoubtedly was, is it credible, as required
by the Bull theory, that he signed at the Synod of Cashel
a petition asserting that those same invaders were bringing
back the Irish to the ways of virtue, and praying the Pope
to confirm their presence in the country? And if anyone
is able to believe that Laurence acted thus falsely and
treacherously towards his country in the interest of Henry,

WORKS OF GIKALDUS CAMBREXSIS. 91

what reason remained for Henry to persecute Laurence
as he continued to do until his death? These are difficul-
ties, of a class that arise only in connection with untruth.
No explanation of them has ever been so much as
attempted. None is possible, save that one which alone
adequately explains these and all other difficulties, namely,
— the alleged Bulls are spurious.

Let us now look into the Topographia Hibernica, which
in the matter of marvels was to rival the Bible. It is a
fantastic description of Ireland and the Irish, in which
Giraldus has the frankness to admit that in his writings
relating to Ireland he derives very little assistance from
Irish sources. Of all his extraordinary statements, that
is, perhaps, the one containing the greatest amount of
truth. He tells some things that are true, some that are
silly to tell whether true or false, some that no one would
like to translate into English at the present day, some
marvellous fancies and some Deliberate falsehoods. From
such raw fibre a gaudy web may be spun, and Giraldus
is as facile a spinner of yarns and weaver of webs as need
be wished for. It was not his intention to write light
literature. He has done it unconsciously. He set about
each of his works with much solemnity, yet, somehow,
when finished, it was found to be light enough, and his
solemnity only heightened the effect. His descriptions of
some of the wild birds, animals, and fishes of Ireland are
correct, and he notices the absence of the snake and the
mole, which are common in England. But truth was
altogether too tame for him. There were in Ireland
biformed birds, having one foot armed with rapacious
talons, and the other foot webbed for swimming. Then
follow some indecent stable-yard jests regarding the origin
of these and other monstrosities. Some storks in Ireland
spent the winter at the bottom of rivers, under water of
course, and came up alive and well in springtime. Weasels
were able to restore their dead young to life. The genera-

92 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

tion and evolution of the birds called barnacles are
minutely described. At first slime of the sea, they after-
wards became shellfish, and finally birds : —

" I have frequently seen with my own eyes more than
a thousand tiny bodies of these birds, enclosed in their
shells, and not yet fully developed, hanging from one
log of wood on the sea beach."

Nor are these things very wonderful, since there are, it
is said, grass-hoppers in Sicily which sing more sweetly
after their heads have been cut off than when whole, and
better dead than alive. Then our author becomes, or
affects to become, serious, and says that henceforth he will
insert nothing but what he has seen with his own eyes or
has been assured of on the most authentic human testi-
mony. After this undertaking one of the first things he
tells is that there is a lake in Munster in which there are
two islands. On the larger of these islands no creature
of the female sex can exist ; it would immediately die on
entering. On the smaller island no person can die ; hence
it is called the Island of the Living. " There is a well
in Munster, and anyone who washes in its waters im-
mediately becomes gray." " There is, on . the other hand,
a well in distant Ulster, and whoever washes in its waters
never becomes gray. Ladies frequent this, as do also men
who wish to avoid grayness." "A certain willow-tree,
not far from St. Kevin's Church at Glendalough, bears
apples." The ravens in the same neighbourhood kept a
fast-day.

" St. Kevin, praying in his cell one day, stretched forth
his hand through the window to heaven, in his accustomed
manner, and a blackbird came and laid eggs in the palm
of his hand, as in a nest. So. patient was the Saint, and
so full of kindness, that he neither closed nor withdrew
his hand, .but unweariedly kept it extended and open
till the young birds were fully fledged."

WORKS OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 93

He gives a vague and mutilated outline of the fabled
magical origin of Lough Neagh, and says that the fisher-
men see round towers beneath its waters. The wife of the
King of Limerick had a beard and a mane. That must
have been very becoming ; but Connaught had something
more exquisite still. A lady there had a shaggy beard
on one side of her face, while the other side was quite
hairless and womanly. The thought of this is enough
to make the new woman die of envy. In one part of
Ireland there was a half-man ox, having ox eyes and no
speech, but lowing like an ox. In another district, in.
order to preserve the author's usual balance, there was
a half-ox man. He has heard " from some sailors " who
had, been driven ashore by a storm on the Connaught Sea
that they had met with Irishmen stark naked, excepting
a belt of raw hide tied about the middle — men who had
never before seen civilized people, a ship, bread, or cheese ;
had never used any clothes except their long hair, which
hung plentifully over their backs ; who asked for meat
to eat, though it was Lent, because they had never heard
of Lent, and did not know what it meant ; did not know
the year, the month, or anything of that nature; were
completely ignorant of the days of the week ; when asked
if they were Christians or had been baptized, answered
that they had never heard or known anything about
Christ ; and went away, taking with them a loaf and a
piece of cheese, to show to their own people the sort of
food foreigners ate. "Some sailors" were clearly the
proper authorities for that yarn. " Still," he says, " it
is extraordinary what a number of saints they have, and
how devoutly they venerate them." It would be more
than extraordinary if, at the same time, they had never
heard of Christ. He tells wonderful things about certain
mills, as that of St. Feichin at Fore ; and says that some
of those mills would not grind corn on Sundays. It was
certainly a strange country where the mills remained so

94 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

pious, while the people, though devoutly venerating their
numerous saints, had lost even the recollection of
Christianity. They had lost their clothes as well ; but that
was such a trifling detail that, in their comfort, they soon
forgot they had ever worn any. They were obviously in
need of Bulls to make them all right. After repeating
the substance of his scandalous sermon in Dublin, he gives
an outline of the history of Ireland from the earliest times
to his own. It is based on the legends of the story-tellers,
hammered into what Giraldus considers correct form ;
and our only regret is that he did not, add a history of
the future, both would be so appropriate in this work.
Until times comparatively recent, Englishmen, unwilling
to know the truth about a country so near them, professed
to believe that this caricature was the true and only
history of Ireland before the Conquest. In it Giraldus
alleges four grounds of justification for the invasion of
Ireland by Henry II., namely (1) that the kings of Ireland
had paid tribute to the British King Arthur; (2) that
the Irish had voluntarily submitted to Henry; (3) the
Papal privilege ; (4) the uncivilized and bestial condition
of the Irish, some of whom had tails like animals, while
those of normal shape had the manners of animals. The
only art he credits them with is music ; in which, he says,
" they surpass every nation I have ever seen." He next
introduces us to fleas in Connaught; but I beg pardon
for having strained the reader's patience so severely.

We have now before us ample evidence on which to
form an independent opinion on the question, whether
the ingenious author of the works just glanced at is or
is not a credible witness when he makes statements in
themselves improbable, stands unsupported, and admits
doubt to some extent. Hold up the balance, and let not
so much as a breath of air affect its tendency. What we
have been seeking in Giraldus, what must be found in
him if the Bulls are to stand, is veracity. Have we found

WORKS OF G1RALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 95

that this is the quality for which he was distinguished?
Is he or is he not a true witness in whom, unsupported,
we can confidently repose implicit trust? Has he kept
in all his works the promise given in various words in
all of them to tell us the truth? Was he painstaking in
examining statements before adopting them, obedient to
the rein of conscience, grave and slow in undertaking
responsibility? Does not every reader who enjoys him
know that his special charm consists in his lack and
disregard of those qualities, and in his obedience to
passion and impulse? Do we, in other matters,
in any matter, accept the unsupported statements
of such a man? If we are prepared to accept
his unsupported statements, how many of them,
which of them? and on what principle are we to make
a selection? If he describes a hare or a badger, we know
how far he is right. If he makes historical statements
which are made by anyone else independently, or which
agree with the texture of history, we are satisfied. But
his visions, his vilifications of a people whom his
immediate relatives are engaged in fighting, his documents
which are part and parcel of the plot, these one and all
we reject with scorn; and we should not be sane people
to do otherwise. Sleek patrons manifest their peculiar
kindness to us by offering the compromise of cutting off
the tails he puts on our men, and the manes he puts on
our women, and letting the residue stand as correct.
Giraldus's gross statements are less offensive than such
a compromise. We will have none of it. We will allow
no pruning and tailcutting to be practised upon our
ancestors. If they must be credited with bestial manners
on the authority of Giraldus, they must by all means,
on the same distinguished authority, be allowed to retain
their then appropriate appendages of manes and tails,
horns and hoofs.

Sir James Ware includes in his work called The Writers

96 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

of Ireland, a notice of the Cambrensis Eversus, and on
page 163, says of Archdeacon Lynch, the author of that
work —

" He published this book under the feigned name of
Gratianus Lucius, and compiled it in defence of his
country against the fabulous and malicious reports made
of it by Girald Barry, commonly called Cambrensis,
wherein with a judicious and sharp pen he exposeth the
numberless mistakes, falsehoods, and calumnies of that
writer, showing, in confuting him, that he was well
qualified to undertake the subject by a great compass of
knowledge in the history of his country and in other
polite learning."

The question of the authenticity of the Bulls is now
nearly settled. To that end all that remains for you to
do is to forget all Giraldus's fibs on every other subject
on which he wrote, and believe all he tells you about
Ireland. Let your "opinion rest mainly upon Giraldus."
" Give up Irish authorities for him." Close your eyes to
the fact that while he put tails on Irishmen, he forgot
to put either heads or tails on his Bulls. He saw the
Bulls with his own eyes — after he had written them. He
presents them to you on the highest human authority —
his own. If you are not satisfied, his works contain plenty
of bad language, applicable to your unreasonable condition.
If we were to treat him as a serious historian and credible
witness, we should surely be bound to look to him for
answers to some, at least of the important questions
inseparable from that role. He being the only original
bearer of the two principal Bulls is the person who should
tell us most about them, is he not? Does he account for
the absence of Henry's name from the beginning, the
absence of Adrian's from the end, the absence of the Papal
Chancellor's name, the absence of place of issue, the
absence of date, or all or any of the discrepancies we have
discussed? No. Does he fortify them by reference to any
facts upon which we can confidently rely ? No ; on the

WORKS OF GIRALDTJS CAMBRENSIS. 97

contrary, he, the first bearer of these two consecutive
instruments in a single transaction, one of them confirming
the other, says that one of them is thought by some to
be spurious, while he apparently derives both from the
same source. This statement of his renders it certain that
that one at any rate was not copied from a Papal original,
and highly probable that the other was not either. Where
did he find them ? Was it in the same storehouse in which
he found tails for Irishmen? Of course, he does not tell
us. Where he found them is probably the last thing he
would tell. He may have found them pinned to the brief
on which he based his sermon in Dublin. You are offered
Bulls, tails, horns, and all on precisely the same authority,
and must judge whether that is sufficient to sustain all
or any of them. If people who accept the Bulls are
satisfied with their only indispensable witness, it seems
to me that people who reject them have far more reason
to be so. He was one of those dangerous men who write
libels with a solemn face, and, while they themselves are
the real criminals, presume to sit in judgment upon decent
people. At the same time, without feeling any certainty
on the point, I should ultimately prefer to believe that
Giraldus was not the actual author of the Bulls, but was
the dupe of some one more cunning. This opinion rests
chiefly on the fact that he retained till the day of his
death many of the ways of an overgrown schoolboy. He
resembled one of those receptacles in public gardens into
which people are invited to throw papers for which they
have no other use.

The curious works we have noticed are in part true,
in part consciously but innocently fictitious, in part
unconsciously fictitious and due to the author's tempera-
ment and circumstances, and in part deliberately and
maliciously false. The blending of these ingredients by
Giraldus renders the net truth for ever inextricable. His

materials and methods, suitable to a certain extent for

H

98 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

poetry, are indefensible when he presumes or pretends to
write history. The most lenient view of his work cannot
exculpate him from having sacrilegiously polluted the
fountain of Irish history for readers in England. On him
must rest responsibility to a very considerable extent
for the misunderstandings that have always existed
between the two countries. Such conscience as he had
was of the most flimsy and accommodating order. But
he had some sort of conscience ; for when the shadow of
death began to creep over him, when, as he says, he had
become an old man and desired reconciliation with God
and the edification of posterity, he wrote a new introduc-
tion to the last edition of the Expugnatio prepared by
himself. This will be found in Volume Y. of his Works,
and pages 409 and 410 are very touching. Looking back
upon events in Ireland which, in the days of hot blood
and effervescent brain, he had vainly dreamt of immortalis-
ing as surpassingly glorious, he is forced to acknowledge
that the progress then hoped for has proved to be real
retrogression, and he almost regrets the invasion and its
deplorable consequences : —

"The evil plight of everything has become worse,
because to the Church of Christ, newly come into our
power, we have brought nothing new. Not only have
we not judged her worthy of princely liberality and due
honour, but we have even taken away her lands and
possessions, and have systematically striven to mutilate
or abrogate her pristine dignities and ancient privileges."

What a change this is from his insolent sermon in
Dublin ! Can anyone doubt as to which document contains
the truth? Referring to the LaudaMliter, he says that
the commission to exalt the Church has been turned into
a commission to plunder churches : " Et sic ' Ecclesiam
exaltare ' versum est ibi in ecclesias spoliare." Whoever
looks into the Annals of the Four Masters, under the
years thus referred to, will find ample grounds for this

WORKS OF GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 99

remorse. Such, sentences as, " Louth was laid waste by
the Saxons," frequently meet the eye. Sword and flame
were as unsparingly used on peasant, church, and home-
stead as in the days of the pagan Danes. Later, the sons
or grandsons of those men found themselves treated as
mere Irish by newer comers, who came preaching order
but producing chaos. And of the many Englishmen who
have so blundered in Ireland since then, how few have
had the honesty of Giraldus to admit at the end that, in
consequence of their meddling, the evil plight of every-
thing had become worse.

About the same time, and alike in obedience to con-
science, Giraldus wrote what he called his " Retracta-
tiones." But this tractate has little reference to Ireland,
its chief object being to set himself right in the matter
of certain libels which he had written against Hubert,
Archbishop of Canterbury. He begins it with the
appropriate old saying that " not to sin in anything is
divine rather than human." He then proceeds to say :
" I propose to set out here those things which are in my
little works and which ought to be withdrawn, in order
that the reader may beware and not take for certain
things that are uncertain." On the part of a man who
had made himself responsible for so many strange
assertions, this mild opening, without self-accusation or
regret, does not promise a rigorous or full examination
of conscience. Scanty as the promise is, the performance
is scantier still. The whole tractate extends to only a
few pages, and more than half of it is occupied tendering
to Hubert the most left-handed apology ever written.
The editors remark that he might have made his retracta-
tion longer. Obviously — if he intended it to be complete.
But if all he should have retracted, or should never have
written, were withdrawn, the remnant of his works would
be insignificant and worthless. Of this tractate of retrac-

100 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

tations so far as it relates to Ireland, Harris, the translator
and editor of Ware's works, very justly says: —

" It is only a very slight apology for the many base
scandals and invectives he had heaped together concerning
Ireland in his Topography, many of which he confesses
he had picked up only from that Publick Lyer, Common
Fame, and yet has not remorse enough to disown them,
concluding only that he would not for the most part affirm
them, nor would he altogether deny them. Many Irish
writers have published antidotes to some of the peculiar
poisons of Cambrensis, but John Lynch, in a book entitled
Cambrensis E versus, has to some purpose taken him to
pieces, and with a sharp and judicious pen exposed the
numberless mistakes, falsehoods, and calumnies of that
malicious writer."

Though no recantation can ever be fully effectual against
falsehoods which have taken a place in literature, we Irish
are as ready as other people to acknowledge that his
recantation — tardy, reluctant, and inadequate as it is —
redeems Giraldus's character somewhat. But there is no
reason why we, alone of all mankind, should be blind to
the collapse it constitutes. We can afford to say in our
own humble fashion " May God forgive him his sins," but
we are not obliged to go further and invest him with
mitre and crozier in order to induce people to believe
what he says of us. We are not obliged to give up Irish
annalists who are generally as accurate as the sun for a
stranger who is notoriously more changeable than the
moon. The only special reason we have for treating him
seriously is the fact that he was the first deliberate
tradiicer of our people for the English market. As is his
reputation for veracity, so are the Bulls. " I now dismiss
thee, my Giraldus, who hast made for thyself a name big
and bloated but not good." — White's Apologia, p. 18.

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 101

CHAPTER V.

Further Discussion of the Principal Instrument.

THE argument which gives most colour of probability to
the Laudabiliter , which comes home most forcibly to
everybody, and which has contributed more than anything
else to convince people, is that arising from Adrian's
nationality. It is most natural to suppose, and therefore
people do suppose, that he was willing to strain a point
in favour of the king of his native land, who, by a rare
chance, had become King almost on the same day that he
had become Pope. This contention is so extremely
plausible that for many it constitutes in itself the very
vitality of the Laudabiliter , and renders further inquiry
unnecessary. It is dwelt upon in documents from which
I have quoted, and in many which I have not mentioned ;
and, appealing as it does to the heart as well as to the
reason, its enormous force cannot be denied. It is
sustained by the fact that Henry, being then only twenty-
three years of age, may be taken to have been still a
comparatively pure youth, unstained by the crimes and
vices of subsequent years, and might, conceivably, be
deemed a suitable person to entrust with the performance
of a good work. Plausible and forceful as the contention
is, no sooner do we study it closely, even in admiration,
than it becomes unsatisfactory. For, while admiring the
supposed pure youth of twenty-three, we cannot keep out
of our minds the question : Is the being a young layman
of twenty-three a special qualification for the conversion
of a people sunk in disgusting moral enormities ? Would
such an appointment, as one of the first acts of a new
Pope, prove his sanity or insanity, which?

102 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

The assumption that Adrian wrote this or any other
sweet letter to Henry is based upon an entire misconcep-
tion of Adrian's character, knowledge, and experience.
His life furnishes no reason in the world for thinking
that he was a man subject to illusions or girlish emotions.
If he had had them naturally, there is no reason, outside
this document, to show that he carried them into the Chair
of Feter. But outside this document there is no reason to
think that he had them naturally in ruling force. Men
who rise, as he did, from the lowest rank without
extraneous aid, but by personal merit and force of
character, must hare, at starting, a fund of good sense,
not of illusions. In their progress they acquire a great
knowledge of human nature, and are generally able to
judge the character of others and to control their feelings.
This was Adrian's case, and he soon gave to the world a
signal proof of his real character. The German Emperor,
Frederick Barbarossa, at the head of a great army, was
marching upon Rome with dubious intent. Adrian went
with some attendants to meet him. The Emperor refused
to give the usual salutation. Thereupon Adrian, the
humblest of men, refused to give the kiss of peace. The
Pope's attendants fled from the frowning faces of Frederick
and his soldiers. Adrian remained alone but fearless.
Alone he forced that stubborn Emperor to descend in
presence of his proud soldiers and hold the stirrup for
the Vicar of Christ. No matter what view anyone may
take of the propriety of that transaction, the extraordinary
courage, independence, and self-possession displayed by
Adrian were such as would be extremely difficult to match
in history. Yet these are the very qualities which the
writing of the Lauddbiliter would prove that he wholly
lacked. One of the results of Adrian's having been born
in Henry's dominions was that he had a better knowledge
of Henry, and of the Plantagenet family generally, than
if he had been born elsewhere. One of the consequences

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 103

of this special knowledge was that he distrusted Henry,
and never wrote to him at all. That is the conclusion to
which my researches have led me. During his com-
paratively short pontificate Adrian issued as many Bulls
and letters as any other Pope in a like time, most of them
addressed to ecclesiastics, but some to the rulers of nearly
every country in Europe. Migne's collection contains 258
of them, all characterised by good sense and piety, except
the Laudabiliter, and that is the only one addressed to
Henry, if it is addressed to him.

Nor is there any better foundation for the assumption,
essential to belief in the Laudabiliter, that Adrian thought
Ireland was a land of savages. He, in common with all
educated men, knew that Ireland had sent to the Continent
from the sixth century down to his own time a stream
of missionaries eminent for learning, sanctity, and religious
zeal, at times pouring them over Europe, as St. Bernard
says, " like an inundation," and had thereby acquired the
name of Insula Sanctorum. He himself had actually
studied at Paris under an Irishman of that class, Mael-
Muire, called on the Continent Marianus, a man whom
he revered during his life. He knew in common with all
men of sense that all the Marianuses had not gone out of
Ireland, that many as able and as virtuous had remained
at home devoting themselves to the service of God and
of their own people, and that all had been educated in
Ireland. Of some of these who had never left Ireland,
and lived in his own time, the fame for sanctity was wide-
spread and cannot have escaped his ears. Three Irishmen
who lived in his own time are enrolled among the
canonized Saints of the Catholic Church. He knew that
the Irish had a regularly constituted hierarchy and body
of clergy, that one of the Irish Bishops was a resident
Legate of the Holy See, and that in 1152, only two years
before his own accession, Cardinal Paparo had been in
Ireland, had conferred pallia on the four Archbishops,

104 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

and had presided over the Synod of Kells at which certain
reforms were decided upon under his guidance. All this
knowledge is utterly inconsistent with the assumption in
the Laudabiliter that the Irish were savages outside the
pale of Christianity and had forfeited the rights of free-
men. Nor could indefinite and spasmodic accusations like
those of Giraldus convince any sensible man that such was
the case. If by any process he had been so convinced,
he would have resorted to the methods of Popes before
and since, consulted the Legate and the Irish Bishops,
devised a rational remedy, and subsequently manifested
an interest in its progress. He did not one of these things.
If we are to believe the Laudabiliter, he discovered that
the Irish had suddenly become savages, but fortunately
he discovered at the same time an entirely new mode of
reconverting them. Ecclesiastics were to be discarded
and kept in the dark. The Irish were to be reconverted
without knowing it ; and that, too, by Henry Plantagenet,
aged twenty-three. And the alleged author of this new
plan, subsequently communicating with the Irish, not
through Henry, but through the old channels, never
inquired how the new plan was working. All this is so
bad as to be simply untenable. But the writing of the
Laudabiliter by Adrian would mean even worse than this.
As read by its supporters, it would mean that he sold
the liberties of the Irish people to Henry for as many
denarii as there were houses in Ireland ; and that the
Irish people were, without accusation or trial, without
excommunication, censure, or any of the ordinary pre-
liminary steps, to be deprived by him of their liberties
and made pay the price as well. This is just what
Castlereagh did later, and we have no doubt what to think
of him for it. There was not much resemblance between
him and Pope Adrian.

No embassy, solemn or other, was sent by Henry to
Rome to solicit from Pope Adrian a Bull relating to

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 105

Ireland. An embassy or mission consisting of Rotrodus,
Bishop of Evreux, the Bishops of Lisieus and Le Mans,
and the Abbot of St. Albans, was sent by Henry
immediately after his accession, and its purposes are well
known and perfectly intelligible. They were — (1) to pay
the usual courtesy of congratulating a new Pope on his
accession, a courtesy specially incumbent on Henry in
this case, owing to the unprecedented circumstances that
Adrian was the first Englishman who had become Pope,
and that he had become Pope in the same year and in the
same month in which Henry had become King ; (2) to
ask the Pope to release Henry from the obligation of a
rash oath which he had made to his father ; (3) to solicit
the Pope's sanction for subjecting the Church in Scotland,
and ultimately in the whole of the British Islands, to the
jurisdiction of the English Archbishops. These objects
are not specified in Henry's congratulatory letter which
this embassy bore. They are gathered from other evidence
no less cogent, and are not disputed. They were ample
for the embassy, and in no place is there a word to suggest
that there was any other object. John of Salisbury did not
accompany this or any other embassy in any capacity,
did not visit Pope Adrian until nineteen months after the
date of this embassy, and therefore could have no ground
for claiming as his own the work of the embassy. This
is the embassy that is credited with having obtained the
Laudabiliter. If John of Salisbury had accompanied it
in an inferior position, as has been suggested, and if the
embassy had obtained the Laudabiliter, his inferior position
would not entitle him to say that he had obtained it by
his own prayers. The request would have been that of
the King, and even the Bishops and Abbot would hardly
have arrogated it to themselves, much less he.

(1.) Henry's letter of congratulation, to which the
Laudabiliter is said to be the reply, occupies its proper
place in the Annales of Baronius at the close of the year

106 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

1154. It eloquently expresses great joy, admiration, filial
affection, and obedience ; but it contains no petition, not
a word about Ireland, and no acknowledgment of the
Pope's sovereignty over islands ; nor is there any other
letter from Henry in which those subjects are mentioned.
How the Laudabiliter, which is expressly concerned with
those subjects, and at the King's request, can be an answer
to this letter, which neither requests anything nor men-
tions them, is more than anyone not Bull-smitten can
understand. Baronius does not insert the Laudabiliter
after Henry's letter, where it should come if it were the
answer and free from suspicion. Nor does he insert it
in his regular narrative at all. But, after recording
Adrian's death in 1159, he groups the Laudabiliter in an
appendix of doubtful documents, some of which he
expressly describes as fables, and for none of which he
accepts any responsibility. He states that he derives it
from the Codex Vaticanus, and that its condition is such
that he cannot determine its correct date. Cardinal Moran,
when residing at Rome, ascertained that the codex called
by this name is a manuscript copy of the history of
Matthew Paris, and that there is no Vatican copy, properly
so called, of the Laudabiliter or of any of the Bulls we are
considering, nor is there any original trace of one of them
to be found at the Vatican. There is none but English
authority for any of them. Matthew Paris was a monk
of the thirteenth century, who copied and extended the
Chronica of Roger de Wendover, a monk of St. Albans.
The Chronica includes the Bull copied from Giraldus,
who is, therefore, Baronius's ultimate authority.

(2.) We are not called upon to discuss the second
purpose of the embassy.

(3.) Efforts, open and secret, were persistently made in
the twelfth century by the English Archbishops to extend
their jurisdiction over Scotland and the Isles ; and their
desire to include Ireland was no less real, though less

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 107

openly avowed. For a long time it had been a traditional
ambition of the See of Canterbury to extend its primatial
jurisdiction over the whole of the British Islands, and
thus form for itself a new patriarchate. Everything that
favoured that project was welcome at Canterbury. The
Danes or Ostmen of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick,
were slow in becoming Christians, and their paganism
helped to delay their amalgamation with the Christian
Irish. When, at length, they became Christians, that
amalgamation was not complete. They regarded them-
selves as colonists in Ireland, and wished to have bishops
of their own distinct from the Irish Bishops of the respec-
tive districts. Looking back now, we can easily see that
theirs was a mistaken view, and that if Ireland was not
their country they had no country. But they formed
important and wealthy communities, and their desire was
acceded to. In the case of each of those three cities they
chose for their first bishop an Irishman; but they sent
him to Canterbury to be consecrated. On subsequent
occasions they selected an Irishman or one of their own
race indifferently ; but continued to have their bishops
consecrated, and their priests ordained, at Canterbury.
This entailed a duty of canonical obedience to Canterbury
— exactly what Canterbury wanted. In this way, con-
sciously or not, they were the first Unionists ; from the
Irish standpoint the first disruptionists. Their action was
the first insidious element of disintegration introduced into
the Irish nation, of which they had really become a part.
When Henry II. came, his conquest, so far as it extended,
gave him, according to the practice of the time, the right
of nominating bishops to Sees ; but the right acquired by
conquest derived additional and irresistible force from the
previous custom of the Danes. When, in subsequent years,
this two-fold right had been confirmed by time, and by
the unwavering loyalty of Dublin and Waterford to him,
Henry had as full a power of nominating bishops for

108 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

those cities, as for any other city in his dominions. Their
sovereign beyond question, he needed no Papal or other
enabling authority and had none. So long as he presented
suitable men, his subject, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
was bound to consecrate them, and was only too glad to
do so. That this was the basis, the ample basis, of Henry's
assumption of that power in Ireland, is clearly shown by
what followed in his own and succeeding reigns. Had
what is called a Bull been genuine, it would have been
Henry's duty, and obviously his interest, to nominate a
successor when the Primatial See of Armagh became
vacant. It became vacant, and neither he nor anyone on
his behalf attempted to interfere. Why? Because the
power of his sword did not extend so far and he had no
other power and did not claim to have any. On the very
first vacancy of the See of Dublin he sent an Englishman
to occupy that See, and that See continued to be occupied
by Englishmen down to the time of the Reformation, I
believe without a break. The same rule was long adhered
to in Ferns and in Waterford. On the other hand, the seven
successors of Gelasius in the See of Armagh were Irish-
men, and the See of Cashel continued to be filled by
Irishmen down to the time of the Reformation without a
break. If the Laudabiliter had been genuine, and Henry's
authority, he could have made no such distinction, because
it makes none. It does not say that Armagh and Cashel
were all right, and that it was only in Dublin and Water-
ford the rascals were. The moral is — no Bulls and no
authority in Canterbury; and this is just the attitude the
Irish Church has always maintained. Furthermore, liad
the Laudabiliter been genuine, its effect would have been
to arm with the powers desired for the proposed patriar-
chate, not the Archbishop of Canterbury, but King
Henry II.

The next argument, also, with which we have to deal
is one of strong probability. It is the striking resemblance

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 109

between the Laudabiliter and a Bull of Adrian's which
is unquestionably genuine ; proving, we are told, that
both were written by Adrian. So far from denying this
resemblance, I insist upon it, and invite the reader to
judge whether it is not too close, and whether its effect
is not to discredit instead of proving the Laudabiliter.
The resemblance is so close and remarkable that it catches
the eye on the most cursory glance through Adrian's
letters. First of all, a resemblance could not in any case
prove the Laudabiliter, and admirers of the Bulls are not
wise in pressing it with that object ; because, as already
pointed out, a forged document always is made as like a
genuine one as the forger can make it. To simulate
the real and fortify itself with every element and cir-
cumstance of probability is of the very essence of forgery
and almost a definition of that crime. Notwithstanding
this, forgers failing to rid themselves completely of
human frailty, their work is sometimes detected. It may
even happen that excessive closeness to a model will
betray them. Please pay special attention to a case in
point and to another embassy or mission. This mission
was sent to Adrian in 1158 by King Henry of England
and King Louis of France jointly. While the letter or
petition which it bore seems to have been signed by Louis
only, Henry took the greater interest in the business,
and the conduct of it was entrusted to a subject and great
friend of his, the same Rotrodus, Bishop of Evreux, who
had assisted at Henry's coronation, who had taken part in
the mission of 1155, and who had made himself on various
occasions useful to Henry. In short, the business was
Henry's, but he, having no hope of obtaining at his own
request the thing desired, induced Louis to lend his name.
Pope Adrian was requested to issue a Bull sanctioning
the proposed invasion of a country the initial letter alone
of which is given in the Pope's reply. In this reticence
the reply probably follows the petition, Rotrodus being

110 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

present to explain what country H. signified. Collectors
generally understand this H. to stand for Hispania, and they
so expand it. Lately, however, it has been urged with much
force that Hibernia was the country the invasion of which
Adrian was asked to sanction. If that were so, it would
of itself be conclusive proof that the Laudabiliter had not
been obtained. As the discussion of that question would
lead too far, I leave it open for a possible future occasion
and proceed at a more modest level. Had Adrian been
a man willing to sanction a proposed invasion at Henry's
request — as the Laudabiliter implies — Henry would have
no need of Louis's signature. Had Adrian been a man
willing to grant such a Bull at the request of one king,
he would more readily grant it at the request of two.
Hence, while if the country to be invaded was Ireland
this request itself would conclusively prove that the
Laud alii iter had not been obtained, whatever may have
been the country, the Pope's answer is of the highest
interest to us. It is of two-fold interest: first, because it
is an emphatic refusal ; secondly, because the letter of
refusal begins almost like the Laudabiliter, and is the
same as the Laudabiliter, word for word, to the extent of
several sentences, with the small but important difference
that while the Laudabiliter is affirmative, the genuine
letter is negative ; while the Laudabiliter amounts to a
cordial Yes, the genuine letter amounts to an emphatic
Xo. There is even a resemblance in the reiteration of
motives. That one was modelled on the other there is
no room for doubting; the only question being whether
this was done legitimately by an official scribe or illegiti-
mately by a forger. The genuine refusal begins : —

Satis Laudabiliter et fructuose de.
Our Bull begins: —

Laudabiliter satis et fructuose de.

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT.

A few long sentences in the body of the letters are the
same, without even so much difference as is here notice-
able. This is obviously no case of a scribe's mechanical
adherence to a common form. No common form can ever
descend into the body and substance of an important and
independent document. To remove every possible pretence
of such a thing, there is not one other letter of Adrian's,
nor of any Pope's, so far as I have seen, beginning with
any of these words. One was modelled on the other. This
position is absolutely unassailable. Whoever has eyes
can see, whoever has ears can hear, that the genuine and
the false document are not merely alike, but to a large
extent identical, that there is no other Bull like them,
and that the substantial difference between them is that
one refuses what the other concedes. As this gives special
importance to the fact that the genuine letter is a refusal,
I quote so much from it as proves that fact and defines
the Pope's position. After urging some religious con-
siderations, Pope Adrian says to Louis : —

" In addition to this, it seems to be neither prudent
nor safe to enter another country, unless the consent of
the princes and people of that country be first sought.
But you, as I understand, without having consulted the
clergy or princes of that country, propose to hasten
and to enter there. This you should on no account attempt,
unless you are first invited from thence on necessity
recognised by the princes of that country."

The genuine letter is, in its justness and firmness, exactly
what Adrian's other letters and his proved character would
lead us to expect from him. And what a different idea it
gives of him from that conveyed by the girlish conduct
of writing the Laudabiliter at the request of one of those
kings, or at the request of a private person. The resem-
blance in language is so close, the difference in sentiment
so great, that, in my opinion, the Laudabiliter instead of
being proved is utterly demolished. I have used many

112 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

arguments to the same effect, but whoever reads the Satis
Laudabiliter will need no other argument, but will be
convinced — (1) that the author of it was incapable of
writing the Laudabiliter, and (2) that the Laudabiliter, by
whomsoever written, was modelled on the Fatis Lauda-
liliter. The forger had fo omit Louis's name and forgot
to insert Henry's. He had to omit the date, which did
not suit him, and was unable to make up his mind about
another date. And thus the Laudabiliter comes to us
without name or date.

It has been asked with implied incredulity : " Are we to
send to France for a model of forgery? " Even that might
be thought worth doing. It is less than ten years since
the manager of the Times newspaper confessed on oath,
in a public court, that he had sent to France for forgeries
and paid £2,500 for them. Henry had a far stronger
interest, and had no need of such effort or expense. There
was in his case no difficulty of any kind. He was himself
ruler of, and spent most of his time in, part of the country
now called France. The model Bull had been obtained
by his friend, Bishop Rotrodus. Obtained mainly, if not
solely, for Henry, he was of course familiar with its
contents and phraseology, as were also his ministers.
Where now is the suggested difficulty? Vanished.

Henry, doubting the loyalty of the first irregular
invaders, came to Ireland at the head of a force capable
of crushing both them and the Irish in the event of their
combining against him. The effect was to strike them
all with terror, and make them so civil that, to the extent
to which he penetrated into the country, he achieved his
purpose almost without striking a blow. While he stayed
in the country Roderick O'Connor, devoid of courage and
unsupported, kept out of range. So far as Henry was
personally concerned, he effected his conquest by the
sword, indeed, but by its flash and without bloodshed. So
long as he remained in the country his absolute sovereignty

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 113

-could not be disputed except by the sword's edge, and this
•was not attempted. Knowing that he could not stay
long in the country, he made the strongest bid in his
power for the siipport of the clergy by causing, with the
assistance of the Legate, a council of bishops and clergy
to assemble at Cashel, and sending his trustiest clerical
friends there to promise, on his behalf, the most liberal
treatment for the Church, in fact the very rights and
privileges which he had spent all his previous years in
withholding from the Church wherever his power was
strong enough. Proceeding by way of courteous invitation
and entreaty, and not by imperative command, he
succeeded in inducing many bishops to attend even from
districts to which his army had not penetrated ; and having
got them together, the terms he offered, amounting to a
millenium, were intended and calculated to make powerful
friends for him. As soon as he and his military force had
left the country, disorder broke out afresh on both sides.
The invaders renewed their raids, and were, of course,
resisted; and the conquest of Ireland, which had seemed
almost complete in Henry's presence, dwindled down to
the sea-port towns, with the adjacent districts and a few
colonies, which had to pay tribute to the Irish for being
allowed to remain in the country. This change produced
a necessity for extraneous aid, Henry being unable to come
again. Necessity being the mother of invention, brought
forth on this occasion the Laudabiliter. The temptation
to father it upon Adrian was irresistible. By a lucky
chance he was an Englishman, and this, though weakening
the moral force, would give a priceless air of probability
— the first requisite for a forgery. Adrian being at the
time long dead, if the Laudabiliter were mooted quietly
without official proclamation, Adrian's successor might
not hear of it, or hearing, might not feel called upon to
repudiate a thing so informal. The sword of conquest

having become weak, an inexpensive scheme, which

I

114 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

promised to strengthen the hands that held it by combin-
ing the influence of a dead Pope with the divisions of the
Irish, was in every way an admirable scheme. The
Laudabiliter once launched in any way, it was impossible
to recede without grave risk. True or false, it
should then be stoutly upheld by every friend of the
English in Ireland. To doubt it or allow it to be doubted
might, at critical times, have imperilled the existence of
English power in Ireland. To maintain it, whether true
or false, was, therefore, a patriotic duty. So it would be
regarded in the nineteenth century, as well as in the
twelfth or thirteenth. Confirmatory Bulls soon seemed
necessary, but such a fountain, once tapped, was not likely
to run dry.

The ablest upholder of the disputed letters writes : —

" Donogh, son of Brian Boru, on being deposed by the
Irish princes had gone to Rome in the previous century,
carrying with him, it is said, the insignia of royalty and
power, and transferred, before his death there, the
sovereignty of Ireland to the Roman See."

What an extraordinary story ! Another wooden leg for
the Bull. One would suppose there were already too many.
First it was Constantine the Great who gave the power.
The document in that case was forged, and Constantine
had no power over Ireland. Now it is Donogh O'Brien ;
and admire the present he gives to the Pope — the
sovereignty of Ireland, of which the Irish have stripped
him. This was more than regal liberality. Under Irish,
as, indeed, under any law, a reigning king had no power
to transfer his kingdom to a foreigner. Here we have
a deposed king doing it. Of course, the story deserves
no consideration except for fun. I will content myself
with one quotation on the subject from Dr. Lanigan's
Ecclesiastical History, Vol. IV., page 14G:- —

" Neither in any of the Irish annals nor in the

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 115

ecclesiastical documents of those times, whether Roman
or Irish, is there a trace to be found of the transfer of
Ireland to Urban II. or to any Pope of that or a preceding
period by either Irish kings or Irish nobility."

Another witness invoked to support the Bulls is Peter
of Blois ; but he makes no response to the call. Like
Robert de Monte, he stands mute. He lived and wrote
later than Giraldus, spent part of his youth in the regular
employment of Henry II., and afterwards willingly
rendered occasional services to that king. A copy of the
Laudabiliter is found among his manuscripts, as are also
copies of letters from the Emperor Frederick and other
persons with whom Peter had no connection. When or
by whom they were placed there, and whether Peter ever
saw them, no one knows. Then he gives no support to
the Laudabiliter'? None whatever. Such evidence as his
writings afford tends exactly the other way. If the
Laudabiliter were, as is alleged, known by him to be
genuine, he was just the man who would not fail to include
among Henry's titles one derived from Ireland. In his
letters written in 1177, 1182, and later, and in his
dedication of a " Compendium in Job," he addresses Henry
elaborately as " Most Illustrous King of England, Duke
of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou," but gives
no title arising from Ireland.

In 1317 Pope John XXII. addressed a letter to King
Edward II. of England, remonstrating strongly with him
on certain intolerable wrongs, of which, he said, the Irish
had complained to him, John, and appending a copy of
the Laudabiliter made from the history of Matthew Paris.
He did this in consequence of what is called an Irish
Remonstrance addressed to him in 1315, in which the
Laudabiliter is expressly admitted. On one side, this
admission is held to be conclusive of its authenticity, while
on the other an attempt has been made to explain it away
as having been made merely for the sake of argument,

116 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

and by way of striking the English with their own weapon.
If it were an admission conceded for that purpose, no
question of its correctness could affect its force. The
admission may have been so intended, for the Remonstrance
is strongly argumentative. But, as it stands, the admis-
sion seems to be absolute. Disregarding the assertions on
both sides, I will place the reader in a position to judge.
The Remonstrance is addressed in this manner : —

" To the Most Holy Father in Christ the Lord, John,
by the grace of God, Supreme Pontiff, from his devoted
children Donald Oneyle, King of Ulster, and by hereditary
right, true heir of the whole of Hibernia, also the petty
kings and magnates of the same country, and the
Hibernian people."

The Remonstrators say that as the Pope hears from
the English much that is false and viperous, and very
little that is true about the Irish people, they desire to
correct the balance in that respect. In manly and indeed
somewhat excessively forcible language, they direct the
Pope's attention to the long and glorious history of Ireland
before the time of King Leoghaire, in whose reign Pope
Celestine sent St. Patrick to Ireland, and from whom
Donald is descended in direct line; they point out how
devoted to the religion of Christ Ireland afterwards
became; and so they proceed to the passage in which we
are concerned, and of which the following is a translation :

" At length Pope Adrian, your predecessor, an English-
man more even by affection and choice than by origin,
in the year of our Lord, 1172, on a suggestion of iniquity,
false and foul, made by Henry, King of England, under
whom, and perhaps by whom, in the same year, as you
know, St. Thomas of Canterbury suffered death for the
sake of justice, and .the defence of the Church, moved by
English predilection, and wholly omitting all order and
law, in fact improperly conferred the dominion of our
country upon him whom for the aforesaid crime he ought
rather to have deprived of his own kingdom. Alas ! he

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 117

relaxed his pastoral watchfulness, and thus, depriving us
of our rightful country, without any fault of ours, and
without cause, delivered us to be torn by the cruel teeth
of all beasts."

The Remonstrance then describes at great length what
the conduct of the English in Ireland had been, and
contrasts it with the professions by which it was supposed
the Bull had been obtained, thus showing how grossly
they had abused the trust reposed in them by Pope
Adrian, and how just and agreeable to Adrian's precedent
it would be to issue a fresh Bull conferring the sovereignty
of Ireland upon Edward Bruce as the Irish then desired.
This last clause gives the explanation of the whole
Remonstrance, and renders it quite immaterial whether
the admission in it was made positively or only arguendo.
The document is substantially the work of Scotch
adherents of Bruce, desirous of obtaining Ireland for
their master and themselves, and willing to bring the
English tradition into their service. Bruce approved of
it, as he would have approved of anything that promised
him assistance ; and obviously it had greater force
presented in the name of the Irish, whether with or with-
out their consent, than if presented in Bruce's own name.
Bruce could not have presented it in his own name with
any hope of success ; first, because he had no right in the
matter ; secondly, because Pope John did not like the
Bruces, and distinctly says so. The document is clearly
the work of Bruce's party, and further confirmation of
this will be noticed in the incorrect spelling of proper
names, in the numerous historical anachronisms of which
no Irish scholar would have been guilty in relation to his
own country, and in the admission of Adrian's Bull, which,
as we shall presently see, the Irish at that time firmly
denied. And if this Remonstrance had been the work of
Irishmen, they would have preserved a copy of it with the

118 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

other memorials of that time. The absence of copy or
record of it by Irish writers shows that they had neither
act nor part in it, and probably not even knowledge of
it. To find it one has to search in the Scotichronicon,
Fordun's Latin History of Scotland. It occurs in Thomas
Hearne's edition of that work, Vol. III., beginning on
page 908.

Having demolished what was described as Irish evidence
for the Bulls, I cannot do better than produce evidence
from the English settlers in Ireland against them. In
the year 1325, that is, only ten years after the date of the
Remonstrance, a letter was sent to the Pope, not by
Scotchmen, nor yet by Irishmen, but by sworn friends of
these so-called Bulls. It was sent under seal by the Lord
Justiciary and the Royal Council of the English Pale
in Ireland, and was presented to the Pope by William of
Nottingham, canon and precentor of St. Patrick's
Cathedral, Dublin. In this document some stale charges
are repeated against the Irish, with this interesting
addition, that they are described as —

" Asserentes etiam Uominum Regem Angliae ex falsa
suggestione et ex falsis bullis terrain Hiberniae in
dominium impetrasse, ac communiter hoc tenentes : They
also assert that our lord the King of England obtained
dominion over the land of Ireland by a false suggestion
and by false Bulls, jind they commonly hold this opinion."

Against the admission made in the Remonstrance
through the mouth of Scotchmen, we have here a positive
statement made in the most solemn manner, under their
own seal, by the English in Ireland, whose interest it was
not to make this statement, that the Irish commonly held
the Bulls to be false. This important document was dis-
covered in the Barberini Archives in Rome, in the course
of a search instituted by Cardinal Moran for authentic
documents relating to Irish affairs in those centuries. An

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 119

exhaustive search in those and other Papal archives, the
contents of which have never been printed, would solve
many an otherwise difficult problem, and correct many
an erroneous opinion. Furthermore, it is manifest that if
the English possessed real Bulls they would on such an
occasion have produced them as the most thorough and
conclusive mode of confounding the Irish and settling for
ever the question of true or false. Instead of doing this,
they sent a whine to Rome.

Gentlemen could easily prove the authenticity of these
Bulls if allowed to argue illogically ; to prove the ante-
cedent by the subsequent and the subsequent by the
antecedent, but not one of them independently. Anything,
true or false, could be proved if that were proof. It is a
method never resorted to in a good cause. The ablest
supporter of these Bulls resorts to it, and without proving
any one of the documents uses each in turn to prove the
others. For instance, he says that Adrian's letter is
proved by Alexander's confirmation, affects to think that
settles the matter, and rides off with an air of satisfaction,
leaving both unproved. He says that Adrian believed in
•Constantino's donation, and in proof thereof points to the
Laudabiliter, a document as impossible to prove as the
spurious donation itself and for the same reason. What
this mode of arguing really does prove is, that there are
no better arguments, and that if logic be insisted upon
the Bulls must be abandoned. With this plan the same
writer combines another for proving the Bulls, if you
please, and in order to make it clear and at the same time
to show that I do him no injustice, I must quote a whole
paragraph from his essay : —

" We would further claim special attention for the
following consistorial decree, made in June, 1558, at the
time when Ireland was raised to the dignity of a kingdom.
It was subsequently embodied in a Bull by Pope Paul
IV.: — 'Whereas ever since the dominion of Ire1 and ivas

120 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

obtained from the Apostolic See by tlie Kings of England,,
they always had styled themselves only Lords of Ireland,
till Henry VIII., breaking away from the unity of the
Catholic Church and obedience to the Roman Pontiff,
usurped the kingly title,' etc. This document alone is
sufficient to prove the privilege of Adrian. What reply
is made to it by the learned impugners of the privilege?
Why this, that Pope Paul IV. wrote only what was
suggested to him by Philip and Mary. Comment is
unnecessary."

Quite so ; comment is unnecessary. The reply of the-
impugners is the reply of reason. The fact that the Pope
had not the Laudabiliter before him, but was prompted,,
is clear on the face of the writing just quoted. It attributes
to the Laudabiliter a transference of dominion — a thing-
not in that document. That transference was an English
tradition. Whence did the Pope derive it? Not from
the Laudabiliter, for it is not there. Queen Mary's cousin,.
Cardinal Pole, an Englishman, was at the moment solicit-
ing favours from the Pope for Philip and Mary. The-
information in question would have been the strongest
reason he could urge upon the Pope for granting one of
the favours he was asking. Cardinal Pole as an English-
man probably believed the information to be true. There-
was, therefore, absolutely no reason for withholding it,
and he had a strong actual reason for conveying it to the-
Pope. We are seriously asked to believe that he, without
cause, omitted to convey the information, and that the-
Pope, instead of deriving the information from the living
voice of Cardinal Pole present with him, searched back
among the dusty papers of four hundred years until he
found, in a document in which it is not, a reason which
Pole had all the time on the tip of his tongue and would
not express. This bare statement of the case renders
comment quite unnecessary ; a reader who could not do-
the rest ought to give up reading.

Assuming that the information was given by Pole in

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 121

good faith, it was none the less in the interest of Philip
and Mary. That the Catholic King of Spain and the
Catholic Queen of England combined, and represented
by Cardinal Pole, would have been powerful prompters
needs no demonstration from me ; it is self-evident.

Passing over the suggested race between the Pope and
Henry VIII. to confer upon Ireland in the sixteenth
century a dignity — if it be such — which it had enjoyed
at least a thousand years before, the paragraph just quoted,
like much that is written in support of these Bulls, in
addition to expressly claiming and assuming much that
cannot be conceded, is calculated to effect still more than
it openly expresses. Its ostensible purpose is to convey a
sweeping denial that Philip and Mary had prompted the
Pope. We now know what to think of that. Its real
and greater effect is not this apparent one, but to capture
the reader's conviction by assuming his assent to a pro-
position implied but not stated, which would silence all
opposition for ever more, but which is so far from being
sustainable that no one will venture openly to submit it
to argument : the proposition, namely, that once a Pope
has based a Bull on a preceding Bull that preceding Bull,
even if forged, must then be regarded as genuine. The
writer does not state this in so many words ; no one will
venture to do so ; but turn back to the quoted paragraph
and say is not that the idea it conveys. Yes, and that is
the sense in which the writer himself towards the end of
the same essay refers back to that paragraph. Now, why
convey to the mind of the ordinary reader an idea so
wrong that it will not bear to be stated in its nakedness?
Why, but to gain some shade, however transient, for
documents which are being shrivelled up by the sun of
truth. Genuine documents never need such contrivances.
Having first bid for the reader's confidence by expressly
admitting that the question is purely historical, the writer
casually raises across the inquirer's path a bar marked

122 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

"Xo thoroughfare." How is the historical inquirer to
proceed if there is no thoroughfare ? The claim that Pope
Paul's Bull by itself is sufficient to prove the authenticity
of a document written four hundred years before can mean
no less than that all statements in Bulls are infallible,
that even a spurious Bull can be rendered genuine at any
subsequent date, and that this having been done it is
irreligious to doubt the Laudabiliter. If that were so, it
would be more irreligious to doubt Constantine's donation,
which, though more frequently confirmed than the Lauda-
biliter has been, everyone knows to be false. An imposture
in the beginning, it remained an imposture after all
€onfirmations. Holy men did not think themselves
debarred from doubting it, did not think the inquiry closed
by all the confirmations, did not consider comment un-
necessary, but on the contrary continued scraping it until
they succeeded in revealing its falseness to all men, Popes
included. This is just what Irishmen have been doing
since they first heard of these Bulls, just what they are
doing now ; and we are similarly entitled to have this
pseudo-religious bar removed from our path. To erect
it is to confess fear of inquiry, and inability to support
the Laudabiliter by fair means. There are other instances
of the recognition of the Laudabiliter by the Pope, to
which supporters of that document triumphantly point,
but to which all the reasoning in this paragraph applies.
In noticing them this reasoning will be understood, in
addition to any that may be peculiar to them.

In 1570 the then Archbishop of Cash el was in Spain,
seeking assistance for the Irish Catholics against the
tyranny of Queen Elizabeth, and Cardinal Alciato, writing
to him, remarks that — " It is well knowrn that the kingdom
of Ireland belongs by feudal right to the Church." This
extraordinary statement is called a proof of the Laudabiliter
by an Irishman who knows, as all know, that the claim
it embodies never was well known, nor known at all, and

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 12-3

is pure fiction. We are not in the least concerned with
what the Cardinal was thinking of ; it is sufficient that he
wrote nonsense. If writings of that sort can be held to
prove anything, or are worth pursuing, the greatest
number of them will be found to have been issued in
connection with the Confederation of Kilkenny, about the
middle, of the seventeenth century. This is an uncomfort-
ably late date for people who attach any value to such
confirmations ; for although it is universally and always
true that no power in Church or State can ever render
genuine that which was originally false, the lapse of time
makes this fact more obvious. If a forged document of
the twelfth century could have been rendered genuine in
the thirteenth or fourteenth, it could equally well be
rendered genuine in the seventeenth. Yet, when a date
so familiar is named, we ask why not in the nineteenth,
and why need friends of these Bulls be uneasy if what they
desire can be done even now? This is the logical result
of their claiming that anything subsequent could render
genuine a false Bull. References to subsequent events,
ancient or modern, have no meaning unless they amount
to that claim. On amounting to that claim they become
simply ridiculous. If you cannot prove your Bull true
on its birthday, you can never afterwards make it true.
That which was originally spurious cannot by lapse of
time become genuine. If there be any purpose for which
it is useful, it can only be the detection of its author.

Innocent X., in his instructions to the Nuncio Rinuc-
cini, says : —

" Ireland recognised no supreme prince save the Roman
Pontiff ; and Henry II., King of England, desiring to
subjugate Ireland, had recourse to Adrian ; from that
Pontiff, who was an Englishman, he obtained with a
liberal hand all that he asked. The zeal manifested by
Henry in wishing to convert all Ireland to the Faith
induced Adrian to bestow on him the dominion of that
.land."

124 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

What all these unfounded sayings do prove beyond yea
or nay is, what we had known without them, that when
Cardinals, Popes, and even Saints write on secular subjects
of which they have no personal knowledge, they are as
liable as other men writing on hearsay to be misled, and
in the instances quoted were, in fact, flagrantly misled,
and induced to state what was and remains historically
untrue, and what the gentlemen who quote these passages
know to be untrue. The Irish never recognised the Pope as
temporal sovereign, and never were asked to do so. They
did not wait for Henry II. to convert them to the Faith,
as Innocent X. ought to have known. The Bull Lauda-
biliter does not confer dominion, as is evident to all who*
read it, such as it is. The Pope's office is no sinecure. Few
public men have more calls upon their attention than the
occupant of that office. To concentrate his own mind
upon them all is an utter impossibility. No one will, with
a serious face, suggest that the Popes, on those occasions,
instituted a special inquiry, or any inquiry, into the-
authenticity of the Laudabiliter. They had more sensible
and important work to do than would be such an
investigation without cause. And besides, the Pope is
not ex-officio an expert in histoiy any more than he is
in astronomy. On many subjects, if he acts at all, he must
of necessity rely upon the statements of other persons who
profess to know, as in sickness he relies upon the opinion
of his doctor. Those other persons may err in malice or
in good faith. The difference is immaterial to my argu-
ment. Popes have accepted and embodied in public
documents certain statements about Ireland which are
untrue. Does that make them true ? Is not its effect
exactly the opposite? Does it not prove to demonstration
that those Popes relied upon hearsay and were deceived?
How can that fact help the Bulls? Just suppose an
analogous case : Suppose it were conveyed to the Pope,
on the authority of an eminent statesman of the present

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 125

day, that the Irish were Hottentots, and the Pope, accept-
ing the assurance in simple faith, on. what ought to be
reliable authority, issued a Bull stating, as a well known
fact, that our skins were as black as the raven's wing.
According to the principle of those who hold that such a
" confirmation " alters the laws of nature, we should
immediately and thenceforward be all black, though our
colour underwent no change whatever. That is the method
of historical investigation essential to the alleged Bulls.
Some other persons besides those dealt with have been
from time to time named as giving support to the
Laudabiliter, but no words of theirs to that effect have
been cited. Why? Because there are none to cite.
Having myself taken the trouble to examine them all
and found that they give no support to the instrument,
I dismiss them as so many unwilling witnesses called in
vain to make an array of empty names for people who
lack arguments. The impartial reader must long ago have
become conscious of the fatal mistake friends of the
Laudabiliter have made in providing it with so many props.
It is hard to know what else to do but prop a thing that
totters. Yet I feel certain that their success would have
been greater and more lasting if they had been content
with arguments fewer in number, but better chosen and
consistent with each other. Having no leg of its own to
stand upon in the shape of an authentic original, con-
firmatory Bulls became necessary, and with lapse of time
other supports, until it came to pass that the unfortunate
Laudabiliter has had at different times probably a hundred
wooden legs applied to it, most of them left ones. The
simplest of us can see that legs for which nature is
responsible, are usually made in pairs of left and right,
to work in such a manner as not to jostle still less to destroy
each other ; and we can have no doubt that the advocates
of this centipede Bull would be very glad and relieved
from much of their perplexity if they could procure two

126 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

legs for it, or even one, of the right sort. We have
examined, and I think smashed, all the legs of any sub-
stance. Dr. Zinkeisen, with full knowledge of them all,
says in the English Historical Review for October, 1894 :
" The Bull Laudabiliter, which has long been considered
by many a genuine Bull of Adrian IV., must now, I think,
be considered an innocent forgery, a mediaeval scholastic
exercise." The innocence or guilt of this particular
forgery, as of all others, must depend upon whether it was
intended to have any operation, and whether the work
containing it was intended to be regarded as history or as
fiction.

Had the Bull been genuine it would have been known
in 1167 to the learned Bishop of St. David's, and he
would have prompted Dermot Mac Murrough to urge it
upon Henry as the most powerful inducement for the
purpose they had in view. It would have been known
in 1170 to Strongbow, when he found it necessary to go
to the Continent to induce Henry to allow the Irish
campaign to proceed. On neither of these occasions was
it used or mentioned. It would have been known to St.
Laurence O'Toole in 1171, when his efforts to unite the
Irish for the expulsion of the invaders proved that he was
unaware of its existence. Those efforts gained for him
Henry's enmity. They would have gained for him a
censure from the Pope if the Laudabiliter had been
genuine. Instead of censure, the Pope conferred on him
every mark of confidence and favour. In 1178, as Laurence
and five other Irish Bishops were passing through England
on their way to Rome to attend the Council of Lateran,
Henry was so suspicious and felt his cause to be so unsound
that he had them all arrested and detained until, as
Ussher says, " they were all, in order to obtain permission
to proceed, forced to swear that they would do nothing at
Rome to the detriment of the King or of his kingdom."
Although an oath obtained under durance could have

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. 12T

imposed little obligation, they probably kept it, which is
more than Henry would have done. Henry, whom no
oath could bind, unable to believe that they had kept
theirs, stopped Laurence on the return journey, and
according to Giraldus, had him detained in Normandy
until he died there ; and this although Laurence had with
him on that occasion a genuine Bull from the Pope of a
very different character from the Bulls we are discussing,
and had been appointed the Pope's Legate for the whole
of Ireland. This contrast between the treatment accorded
to Laurence by the Pope and by Henry must be taken
to be the practical expression of their respective opinions
of Laurence. If that be so, the Pope had confidence in
Laurence, and none in Henry; and Laurence having no-
knowledge of the Laudabiliter, it follows that the Pope-
had none. And this is confirmed by the genuine Bull
then given to Laurence, which contains nothing about the
Laudabiliter, nor about any power conferred upon Henry,
nor about Irish vices. Eveiy fact tends irresistibly to
show that no one except Government agents had any
knowledge of the Laudabiliter until it appeared in
Giraldus's works about 1189 — that is, thirty-four years
after its supposed date. Adrian, Alexander, John of
Salisbury, and King Louis were then dead, and all danger
of repudiation was over.

The wilful exposure of a curious phenomenon is
generally understood to be an invitation to the public to
observe it. It is a curious phenomenon that from the first
day to the last everyone who has attempted to give credit
to the Laudabiliter has, at the same time, attempted to
enlarge its scope. Not one of its supporters, ancient or
modern, has been content with its text, as given by
Giraldus. Every man, without exception, who has so far
undertaken to maintain the Laudabiliter has either altered
its text or represented it as containing what it does not
contain. The earliest instance is the passage in the

128 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

Metalogicus. Next conies the first of those letters attributed
to Alexander. Bight away down the whole course of its
history since then the writings and the traditions intended
to sustain the Lauddbiliter have magnified and exagger-
ated that instrument, spurious as it is. This is more than
a curious phenomenon. It is a grave offence. It would
be so regarded in business. It would be a grave offence
even if the instrument were genuine. Is the offence of
amending a forgery less grave? If anyone who rejects
the letter were to commit a like offence, not alone would
he be promptly and severely condemned, but his attempt
would be set up as a new proof of the Lauddbiliter. Is
tampering with it in the opposite sense less a proof of
its falsity?

Mr. Richey, in his lectures delivered in Trinity College,
Dublin, inserts in the Lauddbiliter these imperious words :
" That you do enter and take possession of that land."
These are not in it as given by any author but himself.
Where did he get them? With what object does he inter-
polate them? He interpolates them with the same old
object for which the Lauddbiliter was first written — to
unite the Pope's name with England's sordid political
purpose. Whoever supports the Lauddbiliter promotes
that object, whether consciously or unconsciously. So
others also insert words not in the Lauddbiliter as given
by Giraldus, and speak of that document as " Pope
Adrian's letter of grant." One who takes liberties with
the text can make it a letter of grant or a letter of any-
thing else he likes. But there are people who think that
such treatment invalidates a document and discredits the
holder. Some writers who give the text correctly furnish
it with a descriptive heading, the description being false
by excess. These arts of twisting, straining, and altering
are not edifying, and do not impart strength. At the very
least, they betray a consciousness that the document is
defective as it stands. People who say that a document

DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPAL INSTRUMENT. '-^)

is authentic should first agree among themselves as to what
the document is, and in what form it can be shown to be
authentic. Giraldus is their highest authority for the
text of this document ; yet they are not satisfied with
the text he has given them, but alter it as danger
threatens.

We have now completed our study of his text, and of
all the arguments worth noticing that ever have been
advanced in support of it. It is sufficiently obvious that
the result is fatal, not to it alone, but to the letters bearing
Alexander's name, which we have noticed incidentally.
These we will next consider more directly, but briefly.

K

THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

CHAPTER VI.

The other Instruments considered. All found to be spurious.

THE five Bulls or letters we are considering constitute a
set with the common object of promoting the English
interest in Ireland. That being so, any taint affecting
one of them affects all. One being vitiated, all are vitiated.
One being false, all are false. If the first is false, as I
think we have found it to be, the discredit of the remainder
is consequential. The second necessarily falls to the
ground, even if written by Pope Alexander's own hand,
since what it imports to confirm is itself false. Once a
forgery always a forgery. Even if the Pope and the Irish
were to unite in calling it genuine it would still remain
spurious. This then is my first point with reference to
the first of these letters ascribed to Alexander — even if
rightly so ascribed it would be invalid. Popes have, as I
have shown, acted upon a forged instrument ; but they did
not thereby make it valid. It remained false, and every
act based upon it was to that extent invalid ab initio.

But Pope Alexander did not confirm the Laudabil'Uer,
and did not write these letters nor any of them. The
forged document which I have shown that Popes acted
upon was a forged Imperial document purporting to
belong to an age many hundreds of years gone by. It
was not a Papal Bull, still less a Bull of the immediately
preceding Pope, still less a Bull of yesterday. That was
too near for deception, and too near for the success of the
old spurious donation to form a precedent. It would be
the business of the Pope and his officials to know Papal
documents so recent. "We have in this case the best

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 131

possible guarantee that the business was discharged. The
man whom we call Pope Alexander III. was, in 1155,
as Cardinal Roland, Chancellor to Pope Adrian IV., and
it is through his hands the Laudabiliter should have passed
to be genuine. First, then, he had personal knowledge of
the fact that Adrian had not issued the Laudabiliter, and
therefore he did not write this first letter. Secondly, this
first letter confirms a grant of the dominion of Ireland, a
thing which the Laudabiliter does not contain, a thing
which Alexander would have known from memory and
from the document before him that it did not contain,
and therefore he did not write this first letter. On this
double ground this first letter is spurious.

The succession of Adrian's Chancellor to the Papacy
made the floating of the Laudabiliter more difficult than
it would otherwise have been, and perhaps explains why
it was not proclaimed, and also why Henry was disposed
to favour Alexander's rival the anti-Pope.

As in the case of Adrian, we must consider briefly
Alexander's character and his knowledge of Henry. The
English Catholic historian, Lingard, thought those Bulls
were genuine, admitted that Alexander was quite aware
of Henry's duplicity and notoriously immoral life, and
expressed his opinion that Alexander must have smiled
at the hypocrisy of such a character as Henry undertaking
to evangelize Ireland. So much light has been thrown
upon the whole subject since 13r. Lingard wrote that if he
were living now he could no longer entertain that opinion.
For my part I think it was strange and absolutely unten-
able when written; and it cannot be maintained for a
moment now. Apart from these wretched letters, there
is nothing in Alexander's whole life to justify such an
opinion. To knowingly address a corrupt and unreliable
man as one inspired by God for a holy purpose, to arm
him with authority of unlimited range, and to smile at the
whole as a good joke, would make the Pontiff guilty of

132 THE DOrirTFTJL GRANT OF IRELAND.

far graver hypocrisy than Henry's, and would be a gross
abuse of his office, such as there is no warrant whatever
for allowing. I have had occasion already to indicate
that Alexander was a very different man from what all
this would imply. Before becoming Pope he had occupied
a position which enabled him to study Heniy closely in
his relations with the Church. He was no less cognisant
of those relations during Adrian's pontificate than during
his own. Information given to Adrian was practically
given to him. He came to his new office, not as a stranger,
but in possession of the. full heritage of knowledge. This
knowledge was not calculated to inspire him with con-
fidence in Henry. When the test came Henry favoured
Alexander's rival so far as he thought his interests
permitted him to do so. This was not calculated to increase
Alexander's confidence in him. Alexander once established,
Henry sent him congratulations and offerings in gold.
The congratulations were accepted : the gold was declined.
The reason is not stated, but it can hardly have been one
flattering to Henry. After a few days the gold was offered
again. It was then accepted, as though purified by the
preceding rebuff. Thomas a Becket and John of Salisbury
were subjects and capable students of Henry ; and though
courteous to him, they knew him too well to trust him.
This can easily be gathered from their letters to Alexander.
They complain of Henry's ambition to become absolute
master of everything within his own dominions, and of
his alternate resistance to, and evasion of, Papal inter-
ference; in short, of his disloyalty to the See of Rome.
Knowing that he could not become absolute master of
the Church in England so long as it continued to form
part of a universal Church, Henry was quite willing to
reduce it to national dimensions by seA'ering the connection
with Rome if he found a suitable season and a sufficient
number of churchmen upon whom he could rely. Every-
one knew this. In Protestant England it is made a merit

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 133

of Henry's, and lie is regarded as a "Reformer" born
prematurely. All this concerned the Pope directly and
intimately, and no man in Europe had a better knowledge
of it than he. And apart from these questions which
touched his own office, Alexander must have been at least
as cognisant as other men of the reputation Henry had
at this time established for himself as an adulterer, a
breaker of his oath, a seller and delayer of justice, a
hammer of the Church, a threatened schismatic, an
incipient heretic, a contingent Mahommedaii. If all the
other evidence which I have urged and am about to urge
were obliterated, I should still be unable in the presence
of this single paragraph to believe that Alexander
addressed this man as a devoted son of the Church inspired
by God for the conversion of the Irish. /

In 1170 King Henry II., desiring to partition his
dominions amongst his sons, summoned a council of
bishops and clergy in London, and intimated that he
desired his son Henry to be annointed and crowned King
of England. This crowning of an heir during his father's
lifetime was a thing that had never been done in England
before, and such ill success attended it that it has not
been repeated. Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canter-
bury, being at the time in forced exile, the English bishops
were under orders from him, and also from the Pope
directly, to take no part in the proposed coronation, as it
was a function specially attached to the See of Canterbury, *-
and the performance of it by any other bishop in the
existing circumstance's would amount to taking the side
of the King against Thomas. Notwithstanding this,
" Roger, Archbishop of York, regardless of justice, throw-
ing aside the fear of (zod, and contemning the prohibition
of our lord the Pope," obeyed Homy and crowned the
young King. Thereupon Pope Alexander suspended
Roger, and also the Bishop of Ihmelm, excommunicated
the Bishops of London and Salisbury, and wrote strong

THE DOUBTFUL GEAXT OF IRELAND.

letters to all of them complaining that " We are sometimes
obliged to extend the rod of discipline against those whom
we ought to have as helpers for the correction of others."
These letters show the relations between the Church and
Heniy as anything but harmonious, and they show
Alexander holding his own with courage and tenacity,
and standing like a man by the exiled Thomas when the
bishops, Thomas's own countrymen, had deserted him and
given way to Henry.

There is a curious little plea, in itself not worth noticing,
but as it is forced upon us as a proof of these letters we
may as well look at it as one of the trifles that are turned
to that use. Alexander addressed Henry as " Dearest Son
in Christ;" therefore, we are told, he had a special
affection for Henry. It is manifest that he addressed
Henry and other Kings so because that was the form in
which Popes had been accustomed to address Christian
Kings, just as " Your Most Gracious Majesty " is the
recognised form in which one ought to address Queen
Victoria, whether she is gracious or not. Every age and
rank has its own forms of courtesy, which must be
adhered to so long as communication is maintained. This
form of address had no more significance when applied
to Henry than when applied to any other King, no more
than "Your humble servant" at the end of our letters.
In the letters of no Pope is this shown more clearly than
in Alexander's, and in none of Alexander's is it shown
more clearly than in those addressed to Henry. It begins
letters containing the strongest censure as well as those
containing none. It is the form of address used in some
strong letters from which I have quoted, and in a further
letter in which he says — :' Your obduracy against justice,
and against our desire for your welfare, we can endure no
longer." In his letters to Becket also, though mentioning
Henry in the same terms of formal endearment, he com-
plains no less bitterly for that. In one of them he writes

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 135

despairingly of the length of time he has waited in kind-
ness and patience for the return of Henry to a sense of
his duty, and how after smooth and sweet words he has
had to resort to hard and rough words, and even to threats
of extreme measures if their property and their freedom
of action were not restored to the Church and its ministers.
The " Dearest Son in Christ " is nothing more than a form
of courtesy, and does not indicate either affection or
weakness. Used in genuine letters, it could not be departed
from in forged ones. Alexander's relations with Henry
were one sustained manifestation of courage and inde-
pendence. For thirteen years most of his letters to Henry
are burdened with demands, complaints, threats. The
struggle between Church and King culminated in the
murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury at the altar.
Thereupon, according to these Bulls, Alexander's heart
softened ; he poured out upon Henry a torrent of affection
so long dammed up, yielded all he had spent so many years
withholding, and then — mark — his heart is suddenly dried
up again, so that after these letters relating to Ireland
he never writes another friendly letter to Henrv. To
accept the Bulls one must believe all this.

It is, to be sure, pleaded that " his acquittal at
Avranches in August, and his submission, reinstated him
in Alexander's favour." If so, how is it that in all the
years that followed Alexander never wrote to Henry in
that sense, except in these wretched letters? I maintain
that he never wrote to Henry at all after the murder of
Becket. In Migne's collection Alexander's letters to
Henry before the date of the murder are given in full,
and their dates and substance leave no doubt as to the
times at which they were written. After the date of the
murder there are scattered through Migne's collection a
few letters from Alexander to Henry, but incomplete,
without date, and with the heading " Intra, 1159-1181."
That is a period of over twenty years, at any point of

13G T11K DOUBTFUL liKAXT OF IRELAND.

which they may have been written, if genuine. The only
letters from liim to Henry that are given in full after the
<late of the murder are — these letters relating to Ireland
and one other which Migne himself places under the
heading SPFRIA. Is it not a remarkable and unfortunate
coincidence that it is to " Henry, King of the English," the
letter is addressed, which Migne, with no interest to serve
but that of truth, feels constrained to brand as spurious?
Is it not a further remarkable and unfortunate coincidence
that this spurious letter, like modern copies of the Lautla-
biliter, is dated at Rome, where the Pope was not at the
time at which it purports to have been written? Here
is the date in full: " Given at Rome, the eleventh day of
the month of December, and first year of our pontificate ; "
that is, llth December, 1159. This same volume of Migne.
contains a genuine letter written by Alexander on that
very day at the place where he did reside ! All this is
so interesting to friends and foes of our precious Hulls
that a reader of either class will like to know the purport
of this spurious letter. It is as kind to Henry as he could
desire, and represents the Pope as taking Henry's side
strongly against ''Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury."
Xow, Thomas did not become Archbishop for three years
after that date. This mistake of the forger led to the
detection of the forgery, and greater care was taken in
subsequent efforts of that kind. In this letter the Pope
is made to say of Thomas : — " We degrade him from
every ecclesiastical order and from the episcopate, and
declare him an idiot: and we command you, under pain
of major excommunication, to impose this condign punish-
ment upon him — namely, to shut him iip in the prison
of a monastery, where he shall perform, perpetual
penance." This is the kind of Biill Henry's courtiers
were ready to provide for his convenience. It would be
impossible to conceive anything more directly opposed
to Alexander's real attitude. The concoction of this Bull

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 137

was a more, audacious act than the concoction of those we
are considering. But the motive was nearly the same.
Were the gentlemen who did it too virtuous to write those
we are considering?

Let us look for a moment at what is called an acquittal
of Henry. It looks more like the Scotch verdict of Xot
Proven. On the Sunday before Lady ])ay in August,
1172, at Mass in the Cathedral of Avranches, before two
Legates, an assembly of bishops and priests, and a large,
congregation of people, Henry swore on the Holy Gospels
that lie was innocent of the murder of Becket, deeply
regretted that crime, and would, within certain specified
dates, perform certain specified penances for having uttered
the rash expression, in obedience to which the murder
had been committed. One of these penances was that he
should immediately restore, absolutely, and without
diminution, its freedom and its property to the See of
Canterbury, and to the Church generally. Another was
that he should regard his kingdom as forfeited, and should,
there and then, become the Pope's vassal, and receive and
hold the Kingdom of England as from the Pope. An
account of the proceedings may be seen in Baronius at
the year 1172. A small portion only concerns us: —

" I, King Henry, do swear on these Holy Gospels of
God that the death of Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury,
I neither planned, nor knew, nor ordered to be committed.
And when I learned that that crime had been committed
I was more affected with grief than if I had learned of
the murder of my own sou. But in this I am unable to
excuse myself, that it was in consequence of excitement
and anger which I had conceived against that holy man
that he was killed. Wherefore, being guilty to this extent,
that I appear to have given the occasion of his death, 1
shall. . . . Furthermore, I and 1113- eldest son do swear
that we shall receive and hold the Kiiiydoni of Entjland
from our lord Pope Alexander and his Catholic successors."

Then Henry and those of the bishops who were his subjects
signed this and other documents in the presence of the

138 THE DOUBTFUL CiltAXT OF IRELAND.

assembly, and these documents were subsequently solemnly
proclaimed, and signed by bishops and leading men in
other parts of his dominions.

Observe, first, that there is no doubt about those pro-
ceedings ; they occurred in broad daylight, and occupy an
undisputed place in history. Observe, secondly, that
Henry was not treated as having any power over Ireland.
Observe, thirdly, that the result is what is called an
acquittal. Henry hardly felt it so to be thus trampled
upon in the dust before the world, deprived for ever of
that mastery over the Church which he had spent his life
in grasping, reduced to accept his kingdom and his
freedom at the hands of the Church, and only so much
freedom and on such terms as she dictated. Xo man knew
better than he that a national Church would not, and could
not, have dared to treat him so. The hardfought struggle
was over, the stiff neck was broken, the Church was un-
questionably triumphant, and the world was called upon
to witness. Acquittal, indeed ! Men may call it what they
please ; they cannot alter its meaning. They call it an
acquittal in order to induce us to believe that one month
later Alexander wrote these letters to Henry conferring
upon him more than had been involved in that long
struggle, more than Henry had claimed or dreamt of
claiming, more than had ever been conferred upon legate,
saint, or prelate, and addressed him as one inspired by
God for the conversion of the Irish, as one who had already
partially converted them. What nonsense ! The credulity
that could believe this of Alexander would be truly
colossal.

Most of what has been said applies to the remaining
three letters as well as to the first. It only remains to
examine their peculiarities. Cardinal Moran, while
admitting the great difficulty of the question, thought these
three were genuine : because they are dated at Tusculum,
where the Pope was in September, 1172 ; because they are

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 139

addressed to specified persons ; and because they are
inconsistent with the preceding letters. These reasons do
not profess to be conclusive. The first and second attest
superior skill derived from practice ; the third attests
inferiority in another respect, and is in the circumstances
an extraordinary reason. These three ignore the preceding
letters, and differ from them in substance, motive and
scheme. They affect to rest upon the conquest of Ireland
as an accomplished fact, and yet betray anxiety lest any-
thing should imperil it. They make the idea of subduing
and civilizing the abominable Irish originate not in
Constantine's donation, nor yet in l)onough O'Brien's,
nor in the Laudabiliter, but in a Divine inspiration of
Henry's — in one of Giraldus's visions, in fact. For carry-
ing out that idea they trust not to the immemorial
weapons of the Catholic Church, but to the power of
Henry's united naval and military forces, with the blessing
of (lod thrown in as an afterthought to save appearance.
The letter preserved by Giraldus harmonizes with the
postscript to the Metalogicus, but not with the Laudabiliter.
These three harmonize with no document but themselves.
Hut they agree perfectly with Henry's wishes. His interest
is, indeed, their chief concern, the conversion of the Irish
being insisted upon mainly as a means of promoting and
securing his interest. That addressed to the bishops is
a strong political rally on Henry's behalf. It directs the
clergy to " diligently and manfully assist in subduing
and retaining that land for that renowned king." It
directs the bishops to censure and excommunicate whoso-
ever should dare to resist Henry, and to "guard firmly
those things which relate to the regal dignity, and, so far
as in you lies, cause others to guard them;" in short, to
act as policemen for Henry. There is not in the largest
edition of the. Btdlarium a letter of this character from any
Pope to anybody. But this letter never reached the
bishops, none of these letters did, nor any letter like them,

140 THE DOUBTFUL (.RANT OF IHKLAXI).

nor any inquiry about them. The Pope never made the
English Government his channel of communication with
the Irish bishops, and except these no Papal letters have
ever been found in an English Government ottice addressed
to anyone in Ireland. Xor have Papal originals of these
letters ever been found. Xo one has ever seen a trace
of them in Rome. Baronius neither includes nor mentions
them. Xot having been discovered until the eighteenth
century, they are not mentioned by any author, English
or Irish, before that time. Migne has copied them from
an English work. His reference is to Rymer's Foe Jerri,
but they are not there. He must have copied them from
the Liber Xir/er ticaccarii, a work compiled from documents
kept in the English Exchequer. They are there ; no one
knows who put them there, when, or on what authority ;
and there is no account of the originals. It seems to me
that they never had Papal originals, and that the office
in which they were found is pretty nearly that in which
they were made, (iiraldus does not appear to have been
aware of their existence, and this seems to show that he
was not deeply in the plot. Contrariwise, they differ so
essentially from the documents lie preserves that they
must have been written by a different hand, which might
have been his. His authorship would be a good reason
for his silence, and would account for their extraordinary
nature. Like his sermon in ])ublin, they overshot the
mark. Armed with genuine Bulls like these, Henry's
representatives in Ireland would have carried all before
them. But they should have the originals to show; copies
would be incredible. Consequently, there irux not a irort/
breathed <ih<nit them in Ireland. Some hundreds of years
after date what are called copies are found, mill in*
////<'/•/, in an English Government office. Had there been
I'apal originals, would they not have lasted as long:' Of
course, the so-called copies are the originals, and are of
home manufacture.

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOTS. 14J

The ostensible justification of all these Bulls being
alleged Irish vices, we must examine that unsavory subject
in connection with the three letters in which it is expressed
in the grossest manner. Lanfranc and St. Anselm, Arch-
bishops of Canterbury, wrote some letters to Popes and to
other persons, imputing barbarity and immorality to the
Irish people. Xeither of them had ever been in Ireland.
They derived their information about it from the ])anes
of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick, who, wishing to be
regarded as distinct from the Irish people, placed them-
selves under the spiritual jurisdiction of the See of
Canterbury, giving a bad name to the Irish as a reason for
their so doing. Canterbury, desirous of extending its
jurisdiction, welcomed both the new spiritual subjects and
their reasons for coming. Reasons of this character never
lose in repetition. Herein we have a complete explanation
of the charges contained in the letters emanating from
Canterbury. That it is complete is proved by the fact
that Canterbury made no attempt to improve the Irish.
Jurisdiction was what Canterbury wanted. Granting that
the Irish were as far from perfection as were their accusers,
their faults were magnified, their virtues ignored ; and
tho primitive condition in which the Church still remained
in Ireland Avas itself termed a glaring vice. In constitu-
tion, discipline, and means of subsistence, the Church had
too long striven to maintain its existence on the basis of
the old Celtic clan upon which it had been first founded.
That basis, upon which it had seen its best and holiest
days, was now in a state of dissolution. The lapse of
centuries, and the many changes they brought, had made
some old arrangements unsuitable and new ones highly
desirable, and the failure to provide these resulted in
some instances in a most objectionable state of things. To
men trained in the most highly developed Church of the
Continent in the twelfth century, the Celtic Church, at
its best, would have seemed barbarous. It was now at

142 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

its very worst. The Irish, themselves were quite conscious
of this fact, and their consciousness was the surest
guarantee that a reform was at hand. However grave the
defects were, or may have appeared to high churchmen,
they were vices only in a technical sense, and had never
been made the ground of treating any nation as outside
the pale of Christianity. Other countries remote from
Rome were in a similarly backward condition, some of
them to a later date. In England changes in some respects
similiar to those desirable in Ireland had been effected
about a century earlier. In Ireland nearly all the changes
involved had been decided upon at the Synod of Kells in
1152. They were in progress when the invaders came,
and it is probable that the payment of tithes was the only
one of them that had not been carried into effect. The
decrees of Cashel are substantially a confirmation of the
decrees of Kells. The conformity aimed at was conformity
with the Catholic Church, and with the English and other
Churches in so far as they agreed with that standard. It
is only English egotism to describe this as bringing the
Irish Church into conformity with the Anglican.

St. Bernard also speaks disparagingly of the Irish. He
did not know them. He speaks more severely of some
people whom he did know. Doubtless, some of the
" Canterbury tales " had reached him. In addition to
these, Irish bishops and monks, as exacting as himself,
constituted him their ghostly father, visited him on their
way to and from Rome, and sought his advice on the
extirpation of such vices as their flocks were addicted to.
Ah ! they were addicted to vices, then ? Yes, and there
has never been, and is not to-day, a nation free from
vices ; and if there is a nation that claims to be free from
vices, it thereby proves that it has one vice more than
other nations have. There has never been a nation either
wholly pure or wholly base ; and it is common knowledge
that, of the highest authorities on this subject in this our

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 143

age, some say that Europe is just now at its lowest state
of deterioration, while others as stoutly hold that we are
on the pinnacle of perfection. If we find it difficult to
decide between these authoritative pronouncements on the
age in which we have the privilege of living, and if, on read-
ing the statement of one side, we are swayed to it, whether
correct or not, people seven hundred years hence, if they
should happen to care about us, will be greatly puzzled
to know whether they ought to be proud or ashamed of
us. Men like St. Bernard have a simple method of solving
this difficulty. For them the world is always corrupt.
Irish bishops and monks whispered their troubles into
St. Bernard's ear. To do so was the chief purpose for
which they visited him. Yices and irregularities neces-
sarily formed the staple of their conversation. It was
inevitable that the conviction should grow upon a man
so circumstanced, who had never seen the Irish people,
that vice was the only thing they were remarkable for,
and that there was nothing else in Ireland worth talking
about. Ah ! it will be said, he was too well versed in
human nature to fall into that error. Was he, though?
His own nature was human, very human, as a reader of
his splendid sermons will soon discover. He spoke and
wrote with such fire and passion that to the present day
his words almost scorch the reader's lips. He so detested
vices, and the sense of their enormity so grew upon him,
that, if his sweeping) denunciations were to be taken
literally, whether applied to Italians or to Irish, much
injustice would be done. He knew not how to temporise
or mince his words. Just imagine Heniy II. applying to
him for a certificate of character ! He was a man carried
away very much by the feelings of the moment, and the
consequence is that, while his writings are eloquent and
edifying, they are not, and were not intended to be,
historically correct. Anyone of a contrary opinion cannot
have read them. Where he speaks disparagingly of the

144 THE DOUBTFUL GltAXT OF IRELAND.

Irish is in his memoir of St. Malachy [ = Mael-Maedhog
O'Morgair], whom lie had known and loved, and who
died in his arms at Clairvaux. The effect of his eulogy of
his dear friend Malachy is heightened, and intentionally
and properly heightened, by painting in the blackest
colours the vices and irregularities against which Malachy
had contended, and over which he had triumphed. The
more numerous and glaring the vices were represented to
be, the greater would be Malachy' s merit in having over-
come them. Every vice and every irregularity mentioned
by St. Bernard did exist in Ireland, and did also exist in
other countries, as he well knew; but, in all probability,
they existed as enormities and scandals, and not as
settled manners generally present. Had they been
settled and general, their extirpation would have taken
a much longer time to accomplish than Malachy devoted
to that task. St. Bernard says: — -" Accordingly, Malachy,
having within three years reduced the proud, restored
liberty to the Church, banished barbarity, and reformed
the practice of the Christian religion everywhere, seeing
all things in peace, began to think of his own peace."
This is admirable ; but common-sense tells us that
barbarities which could be completely banished in three
years could not have been very general or deeply rooted.
And, as regards the barbarities themselves, we know that
Continental writers used the word " barbarous " partly in
the sense, of " foreign,'' or as marking a deviation from
the Continental model. One of the barbarities mentioned
is the eating of porridge. Well, if St. Bernard were to
return now, he would find porridge quite a fashionable
dish, and might even be tempted to taste it himself. In
one of his sermons he speaks of Malachy as if that burning
and shining light, not yet extinct, but only removed";
one '' of whom the world was not worthy" ; a man whose
works were " great, and many, and very good, and even
better than good, because of the original intention. What

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 145

•work of piety escaped Malachy? He was poor towards
himself, but rich, towards the poor. He made himself a
father to orphans, a protector to widows, a patron to the
oppressed." St. Bernard's standard of perfection was the
very highest. Malachy had reached it, and was the iioliest
and most perfect man he had ever seen. In his admira-
tion of Malachy he did not stop to reflect that the nation
which had produced that man, and many like him, could
scarcely have been barbarous. His ardent nature led him
rather to deal heavy blows upon all who had opposed, or
thwarted, or resisted his dear friend. He was painting
the character of one who had been at once very perfect
and his own personal friend. The opponents and the
vices that friend had actually overcome were an essential
part of the picture, and the darker they were made, the
brighter Malachy shone. St. Bernard's picture on the
whole is really a bright one by force of Malachy's character
alone. He_ knew well that. Malachy's sanctity was not
singular in Ireland, and that by including other Irishmen
he might with equal truth have made his picture much
brighter. He was not dealing with others. His subject
was Malachy and whatsoever had crossed Malachy's path.
This explains the whole position and goes far to neutralize
sweeping charges. The statement that Malachy had
succeeded in making all things right in the short space of
three years completes the correction from St. Bernard's
own mouth.

The greatest abuse with which Malachy had to deal
was of a local and personal nature. It was the pretended
inheritance of Church property by laymen who, taking
advantage of disorders occasioned by Danish irruptions
and accidental favouring circumstances of corruption,
weakness and apathy, had in a few places assumed the
titles and all the worldly goods of bishops and abbots,
leaving the ecclesiastics who strove to discharge the duties
of those offices stripped of their means of living. In this

L

146 THE DOUBTFDX GRANT OF IRELAXD.

way a certain family liad seized upon all the property
belonging to the primatial See of Armagh and held it in
spite of all complaints for many generations, until at last
Malachy succeeded in dislodging them at the risk of his
life. This abuse was no part of the Celtic ecclesiastical
system, but was a symptom of the decay of that system;
and it was the cause of troubles and scandals in various
parts of Europe as well as in Ireland. And the action of
Henry II. in keeping Sees vacant and appropriating their
revenues, which the Pope frequently condemned, differed
from the abuse at Armagh only in being the action of a
king, while that at Armagh was the action of a private
family.

The other foul vices attributed to the Irish people by
some of the eminent men named, and more grossly and
offensively by Giraldus and by one of the letters we are
now considering, demand little notice from us even if their
nature permitted of their discussion in clean pages. All
that has been said on exaggeration applies to them more
forcibly than to the abuses with which we have dealt. It
is part of fallen human nature to exaggerate such things.
Vague slanders without names to connect them with could
not have been verified when written, and still less can they
be verified now. They are intangible things, shadows
without substance. They may or may not have been trans-
mitted in huge quantities by Englishmen to the Pope.
If Englishmen say they were, we are not called upon to
dispute. But that would not make them true. They
would remain slanders and nothing more. The Pope
would not have acted without inquiring. If he believed
the slanders, his condemnation if strong would have been,
as on all occasions, decent. He knew it would not lose but
gain in strength by being decent. His language was
always decent even when dealing with matters as bad as
these letters represent. On no other occasion did he use
language unfit to be translated. It is an outrage no less

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 147

upon his memory than upon the Irish people to say that
he wrote the second of these letters to Henry. Had he
been greatly moved by a false report, and written a strong
condemnation, he would have seen that it reached the
Bishops and that they acted upon it. He never inquired
about these letters. His subsequent action was that of a
man who had no knowledge of them ; and that was in fact
his position. In all his genuine letters — and there are
1,520 of them in Migne's collection — there is not one
expression of an indecent character. Of that great number
the only letters that are unworthy of him are — the letter
ordering the imprisonment of Thomas a Becket as an idiot,
and these letters treating the Irish as horrible savages.
All these were written in Henry's interest. Migne brands
the first as a forgery. We brand the others as forgeries.
The vices like the letters were of English manufacture.
The inclusion of them in the letters proves that. Beyond
spurning them we have little to say to them. Slanders
different but as bad have been levelled against ourselves
in the nineteenth century, and supported by forgeries too.
We reject them all, the ancient and the modern. Our
ancestors were a healthy people who enjoyed pure air and
country life. Like ourselves, they Were probably far
from being perfect. Let their accusers apply that simple
test to themselves and confess the result. There are few
pages of the Irish annals of the twelfth century that do
not record the death of some good man or woman
distinguished for charity, piety, learning and wisdom.
These people had spent all their lives in Ireland. Are we
to be told that all the good people were dead or dying,
and that criminals alone were healthy? It would seem
so. What then of the good people? What were they
good for, if they left none but criminals behind them?
Their good name was not merely local nor ill-founded.
Three Irishmen of that century are enrolled among the
Saints of the Universal Church, and much other Irish

148 THE DOUBTFUL GEAXT OF IRELAND.

merit can be equally well verified. Yague slanders are-
evasive and can never be verified. The state in which an
Irishman could believe them would be a state of disease.
To set him right he would need not argument but air
and exercise. A sickly student of Darwinism once threw
up his hands in despair exclaiming that it was folly to
expect that men could ever become noble or even respect-
able since they were all descended from monkeys. His
doctor recommended the excitement of the chase. His
friends, with much difficulty, induced him to follow the
advice. After a few months the youth, restored to health,
laughed heartily at Darwinism and the monkeys.

The Pope is represented as saying that he had received
a succession of letters from the Irish bishops to the effect
that Henry had already partially succeeded in converting-
the Irish, a work in which presumably the bishops had
spent all their lives in vain. What a probable statement
that is. Through Henry's power, crimes had begun to
diminish, and the seeds of virtue to sprout in place of
vice. A learned supporter of these ridiculous letters says
that the vices of the Irish were not due to the invasion,
as is commonly supposed, but were old and permanent,,
because they were such as could not have sprung up in
the short space of a few years ; but he finds no difficulty
in accepting as genuine a letter according to which Henry
had already succeeded in bringing back the Irish to some
degree of virtue, although he had spent only six months
in the country and had visited only a small portion of it.
Had Henry spent six months more in the country the
Irish would have become too holy for anything. It was
lucky that he had to hurry off to kiss the dust at
Avranches. His prompt success as a lay missionary over
the inveterate vices of a whole nation which bishops and
clergy had long contended against in vain, may be left
to the judgment of real missionaries who usually find their
task more difficult. If it were true, thev should revise

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 149

their methods. Pope Alexander \vould need to be
extremely credulous to belive such a story, and to believe
it too of the very man who had given him the most trouble.
The Irish annalists did not believe it. Giraldus did not
believe it, but confessed on his death-bed that the effect
of the invasion was to make the condition of everything
worse. The Irish bishops did not believe it and did not
write it, because they had personal knowledge of the fact
that the country was just then more distracted than it
had been at any previous period of its history. The
English clergymen present at the Synod of Cashel, having
come expecting a barbarous country, and finding it
civilized and provided with a hierarchy and clergy and
-ample means for its own regeneration, reported to that
effect to the King, and in doing so probably gave him
some credit for what they considered a change, but what
was no change except in the amount of their knowledge.
This report supplied the idea of Henry's missionary
success.

The same gentleman, whom I regret having had to
allude to so often, tells us that considerations of decency
prevented Alexander from saying anything in the last
-of these letters to Henry in reference to the denarius or
penny reserved by the Laudabiliter for the Roman See.
If the supposed decent silence was expected to help in
proving the authenticity of these letters, will those who
use it for that purpose allow that the indecent expression
of that same matter in the letter in question is of equal
force in proving its falseness? and if not, why not? On
turning back to this letter it will be seen that a whole
paragraph of it is devoted to the reservation of the Peter's
pence.

A denarius — the word usually translated " penny " —
had a purchasing power equaLto about 4s. lOd. of our
money. Hence a denarius from every house in Ireland
would have amounted to a considerable sum. The invaders

150 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

were in no huny to pay it for themselves ; nor did they
transmit to the Pope any denarii they succeeded in taking-
from the Irish. The careful reservation of the denarius
in these letters may have been intended to serve the
double purpose of aiming a sly joke at the Pope, as
Giraldus once did, -and of giving an additional air of
probability to the letters by suggesting the motive of lucre.

It has been urged with much energy that if those letters
were spurious Pope Alexander's successor would have
denounced them on their first appearance. Would he?
He never denounced the Bull condemning St. Thomas a
Becket to prison for life, and yet it is spurious. Like
case like rule.

To prove a negative is proverbially difficult, and by some
held to be impossible. It is sometimes possible when the
negative is true. But to prove it is not sufficient ; and
what remains to be done is still more difficult — to fix the
proof in the memory. The function of the memory is to-
retain positive facts, whether true or false. Positive facts,,
whether true or false, are the only real facts, and are the-
proper objects of the memory. False statements that are
positive, and things that are spurious, share the advan-
tage of true facts in being easily retained in the memory,
partly because they have the appearance of truth, and
partly, also, because, although false, they are in a limited
sense positive facts. A spurious bank-note is a tangible
thing, which may be taken in the hand and read, and the
making, circulation, and effect of which, being positive
facts, the memory will T*etain as easily as if the note were
genuine. If the maker has negotiated the note, will you
expect him to admit that it was made by him? Of
course not. He will stoutly maintain that it was made by
the bank, and not by him. He will point to the value
he has received for it as proof of its genuineness. If it
has circulated through the hands of other persons, he
will point to every one of them as witnesses that they

OTHER IXSTRUMEXTS FOUXD SPURIOUS. 151

believed it and exchanged it for value or value for it, and,
therefore, that it is true. Persons who have seen it in
business or casually, conform their words and acts to it
as genuine, and thus, quite unconscious of wrong, facilitate
its circulation and give it increased vigour and vitality.
At first having no inherent force, and being sickly, it is
negotiated with caution, and apart from other notes;
but with every new believer, however acquired, it gathers
plausibility and strength, until at length it becomes like
unto true notes, and more aggressive than they. Every
incident in its career is a positive fact, which takes a
position in the memory as readily, and holds it as
tenaciously, as if the note were genuine. To make and
start the false instrument was somebody's interest. To
maintain it may be the interest of several. All who
recognise it in any way help to maintain it. To refute
it may be the interest of a number so large that it may
not be the special business of any person in particular.
If there should be a person so curious, what he has to prove
is that the note was not made by the bank. That is a
negative fact — that is to say, although true, it is not a
fact at all, but the absence of a fact. He has to dislodge
a real, though false, fact, which already holds position in
the memory, and to give the memory instead no object to
lay hold of and retain. He has to create a mental vacuum
where before there was something actual, no matter what.
This is no easy feat. He may succeed in accomplishing
it ; but what remains to be done is more difficult still,
if not impossible. He has to ask people to keep clearly
before their minds not a fact, but the absence of a dis-
lodged fact. This is work for which the memory is not
adapted, and few people even try to force it into service.
To prove that the letters before us were not written
by the Popes to whom they are attributed would be an
undertaking precisely analogous. It would be to prove a
negative ; and as hardly anyone would remember that

152 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

proof, however true, the result would be nil. At iirst
the impure substance was there ; we have burned it away,
and soon the process is forgotten. Herein lies the inherent
weakness of negative evidence, and, therefore, the weakest
element and greatest practical defect in the case against
these letters. Prove as we may, the mere mention of them
by anybody is flourished as a positive fact, while the
number of historical works, Irish, English, and Con-
tinental, in which they ought to appear and do not, is,
though enormous, wholly ignored because it is negative.
Each such case of non-appearance is a fact, important,
relevant, and before reason, of equal weight with each
appearance. The number of cases in which the letters
should, if genuine, appear, and do not appear, is so great,
that if reason were our sole guide the few cases in which
they do appear would be beneath notice. But the few,
being positive facts, are remembered, while the many
are not so much forgotten as not noticed. Even if we
follow these letters to the few works in which they are
included, their condition, is little better. Of the five letters,
one edition of the BuUarium contains only one ; four are
absent. Another edition contains only one ; four are
absent. Another edition contains two ; three are absent.
Another edition contains not one of the five ; five are
absent. Here, if the letters were genuine, we should have
twenty appearances. There are only four. These four are
trumpeted and remembered. The sixteen non-appearances,
though logically of four times the weight, are ignored
because they are negative facts, that is the absence of
positive facts. This inherent element of weakness affects
not alone this one argument based upon numbers, but
every argument against these letters. It is this all-pervad-
ing defect in the case against them that has kept them
from being crushed out of existence long ago. Like flies
on the wound of a chained animal, their life depends not
on their own strength, but on our physical limitations.

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 153

Appearance or non-appearance in a Bullarium does not
prove anything. It is only evidence. The Bullarium is
not an official collection, but the work of a private com-
piler, and, as a body, has no authority, but stands
precisely on the same level with any other large collection
of ancient writings. So far as the documents are genuine,
each carries its own authority derived from its source.
If the collection is large the compiler does not undertake
that all the documents it contains are authentic, still less
does he profess to make them so. He may be in doubt
about some, and he may consider an ancient document of
sufficient historical interest to be worth preserving, even
if he knows that it is spurious. In the case of most Papal
letters Continental compilers had before them either the
original documents bearing their appropriate seals and
regularly authenticated, or verified copies derived from
proper 'custody ; and no question of authenticity arising,
the documents were included as a matter of course. In
the case of documents like these relating to Ireland, which
.are neither originals nor verified copies, which come from
no one knows what source, of which all that can be said
is that they are produced by parties interested, a Con-
tinental compiler taking no special interest in them,
having no means of testing and no incentive to test them,
simply includes or rejects them at his good pleasure, or
according to the exigencies of space, or for some reason
irrespective of their value or want of value. In the
ultimate result the editor who included the Laudabiliter
in the Bullarium has, by exposing its imperfection, done
more to bring discredit upon it than the editor who
excluded it.

It is something that in the language of the Gael which
was spoken and written in Ireland in the twelfth century,
and for many centuries after, there is not a word to confirm
or recognise these letters. It is something that, with all
our weaknesses and disadvantages, we have, without

154 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

emptying our quiver, inflicted upon the cause of the
Bulls wounds beyond number as they are beyond healing.
It is something to have, once for all, given their advocates
a task of extracting arrows which will occupy them for
the rest of their lives. It is something that we now leave
them in such a condition that to restore them would be
far more difficult than to provide new ones. For I have
no doubt what my readers' verdict will be. It has not
been snatched prematurely. It will be as correct, final,
and conclusive as a verdict on circumstantial evidence
ever can be. It will be a moral certitude as indefectible
as any merely human knowledge ever can be. It will
be founded so strongly that it can never be shaken or
disturbed by argument, by evidence, by aught less cogent
than the production of a real Bull Laudabiliter, bearing
its leaden seal. It will be a spontaneous growth from the
evidence, and no more tKe work of my head or hands than
was, say, Constantine's donation. Ah ! that dear donation
which has proved for forgers and their defenders so much
dearer than they bargained for ! And the dear postcript
to the Metalogicus, which tattered what it was intended
to support, and scattered the fragments to the winds.
And the oath of stony-hearted John of Salisbury that
forgers had used his name. Cruel John ! It was pure
modesty that induced the forgers to write your name
instead of their own. Modesty hath trials. Forgers are
the most retiring people in the world. It is with th&
greatest difficulty they can be found when " wanted." It
is with the greatest reluctance they come into the — dock.
Instances are known of their retiring from the dock " for
life." Modesty can no farther go. Very thoughtful and
kind to Henry these forgers were. They knew his inmost
desire and what the rest of the world ought to have done
for him but did not. They had a special knowledge of
what Popes ought to have done for him but did not.
Without obtruding their own personality upon the public

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 155-

they showed the way, conferred upon Henry every power
they could think of, spiritual and temporal, with a
generous hand, and consigned troublesome Thomas a
Becket to prison for life. There was true friendship.
They had the right idea of how the world ought to be
regenerated. And we must not forget Giraldus, to whom
we owe, besides his numerous and opportune visions, the
destruction of his own evidence. ]^or can we omit an
acknowledgment of our indebtedness to those clever
messengers who got Bulls " at Rome," where there was no
Pope at the time ; and Bishop Rotrodus, who did get a
real Bull, but so different from the one he wranted. It
would be the basest ingratitude were we to close without
paying our tribute of praise to the gentlemen who have
hitherto supported these Bulls, for the trouble they have
taken in discovering instances in which Popes and
Cardinals have been induced to say things for which there
was absolutely no foundation. And we shall always
remember with pleasure the excellent arguments which
those same gentlemen have adduced in support of the
Bulls — excellent for toppling before a crooked look. All
these are positive facts of a class for which our memory
is receptive and retentive; and they amount to some-
thing in a cause which we were told was lost.

To add to them there is one thing more. Where are
the Bulls? As I said at the outset, the first step in our
inquiry should have been the production and proof of
the documents themselves. It is a usual and strictly just
requirement. It is essential, and could not fail to be of
the utmost importance. It, and nothing less, could amount
to positive proof. We waived it for the time, in order to
allow the argument to proceed, and to test such circum-
stantial evidence as could be offered. This we have tested,,
and the test has proved fatal to it. Had it all been valid
it could not have done more than increase the amount
of probability. The originals would still be required.

156 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

We have found none of it valid, much of it worthless,
some of it positively destructive of the Bulls. If more
evidence of the same character were discovered, the first
use that could be made of it is to submit it to us, that
we might take it in both hands and test its value. There
is no use in proceeding further without the original docu-
ments. "We have heard and said enough about them, and
want to see them. The originals have never been produced.
No verified copies of them have ever been produced. No
fac-similes of them have ever been produced, as has been
done in the case of genuine Bulls of the same century.
Some hundreds of volumes of State Papers and other
documents illustrative of English history have been,
published by private persons, by historical societies, by
institutions, and by the State; and not one of them
contains an authoritative reproduction of any of these
Bulls from the originals, nor is it stated in one of them
that the originals anywhere exist, or ever existed. Of the
six letters in form Papal written in the interest of King
Henry II. one was designed to assist him in crushing St.
Thomas of Canterbury and the other five were designed
to assist him in crushing Ireland. Three of the six, though
expressly urgent, were not published for some centuries
after date. One of the six is branded as spurious by a
Continental critic of unquestionable impartiality. It was
written by Henry's servants or sycophants, and, therefore,
never had a Papal original. We have found reasons more
than sufficient for affixing a like brand to the other five,
wrritten equally in the interest of the same king. If they
are to escape that brand, obviously it can only be by the
production and proof of authentic Papal originals ; and
the beneficiaries under them, who claim to have been their
custodians, have left themselves without a word to excuse
them from that duty. They have had the documents long
enough in their keeping and in their affections, and can
certainly not complain when at length they are invited

OTHER INSTRUMENTS FOUND SPURIOUS. 15 T

to prove them absolutely by letting others see the originals
besides those who profit under them. The fact that no
original of any one of them ever has been shown can be
due only to impossibility. It cannot be attributed to want
of will, nor to want of skill ; and surely it is not our fault.
It is not sufficient to rail at our incredulity. We are all
ready to believe the documents, to believe anything, on
adequate evidence. This being the only evidence that
in the premisses can be adequate, as soon as it is produced,
but not till then, our adhesion is assured. The original
parchments of earlier and of later Bulls, bearing their
appropriate seals, are still extant, and fac-similes of them
may be seen in B-ymer's Fodera and other books accessible
to the public. We now want the originals or fac-similes
of these. It is admitted that if these were originally
genuine they must have been cast in the form usual with
the Popes to whom they are ascribed. What are produced
as copies do not present that form, and are, therefore,
not correct copies of true Bulls. The production of
originals or fac-similes in that form is essential to any
attempt to maintain their genuineness, and until it has
been done there is nothing to disprove. He who affirms
must prove. This is no case for casual or factitious
evidence, the primary assertion being that formal evidence
of the highest character was pre-constituted, and that
the beneficiaries made the preservation of it the object of
their special solicitude. Whoever, for any purpose,
affirms that these Bulls are genuine, represents the
beneficiaries to that extent, and is not entitled to be heard
until he has produced the Bulls from Winchester Castle,
or wherever he can find them. Since the day the state-
ment was written that they were preserved in that castle,
the purpose of holding a grip of Ireland has never been
abandoned, and the care of all that strengthened that grip
has never been relaxed. Very good. This, if anything,
is what they were preserved for — to be produced when

158 THE DOUBTFUL GRANT OF IRELAND.

required. They are required now. The requirement is
not a hard one, but strictly just. "What is hard and
terribly inconvenient is, to be unable to produce on the
ultimate test, documents with which one has insulted a
people, and which one has boasted of guarding. That is
hard and humiliating. Originals of genuine Bulls as old
still exist. What reason but spuriousness can account for
the absence of these? Why were they not produced in
the twelfth century when fresh and new? Why were they
not produced in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth
centuries, when, according to the English themselves,
the Irish commonly regarded them as false, and when
the production of them would have at once and for ever
settled that vital question ? Why but because no original
Bulls corresponding to these papers ever existed? Let
him who affirms the contrary prove it, as authentic
instruments are proved — by producing the originals.
Failing to do this, let him go and bury the false Bulls
with the false donation in the stillest oblivion.

I owe an apology for the excessive care with which I
have removed dust and cobwebs from documents which
each fresh light showed to be base and worthless. Further
examination of them would be unpardonable. The Popes
never wrote them nor caused them to be written. Falsae
sunt, et eis ad delusionem nostram, et sui damnationem
solus falsarius scienter usus est.

END.

INDEX.

PAGE

ADMISSION of English ... 118

Adrian IV. 6, 14, 102

Alciato, Cardinal ... 122

Alexander III. 16, 39, 131

Alexander VI. ... 30

Ambition of English hierarchy

105, 106, 141

Anselm, St. 13, 141

Avranches, proceedings at ... 137

BALTINGLASS, Abbot of ... 66
Baronius, Cardinal 28, 105, 137
Becket, St. Thomas a

39, 132, 133, 135, 137

Benedict, Abbot of Peterborough 1 2
Bernard, St. 13, 103, 142

Bishops, nomination of ... 107
Bruce, Edward ... 117

Bullarium 33, 153

Bulls never produced 155, 156

Bull, genuine ... 110

Bull, spurious ... 136

CALIXTUS III.

Cambrensis Eversus
Cambrensis, Giraldus
Cashel, Synod of
Conclave, le
Constantine the Great
Cumin, John

DANISH colonists
De Courci, John
Denarius
Diceto, Ralph De
Dimock, Rev. James

... 30
... 56

13, 21, 49
83, 113
... 11

10, 12, 28
... 66

13, 107, 141

... 79

104, 149

... 13

22, 60

FALLACY of late evidence ... 123

Felix, Bishop of Ossory ... 69

FitzAldelin 81, 87

Fitz Bernard 81

PAGE
FitzGirald 51, 77

Forgeries, to send to France for 112
Forgers, modesty of ... 154

Frederick Barbarossa ... 102

Freeman, Mr. ... 61

GELASIUS, Archbishop of Armagh 84
Gilbert's History of the Viceroys 73
Giraldus Cambrensis 13, 21, 49

Gregory VII. ... 11

HARRIS ... 100

Haverty ... 89

Hearne, Thomas 16, 118

Henry II. 38, 72, 73, 74, 133, 137
Henry's letter of congratulation 105
Henry VIII. 5, 120

Hereditary right 26, 39, 40

Hovenden, Roger de 13, 80

Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury 99
Humiliation of Henry II. ... 137

INNOCENT X.
Irish morality

JOHN XXII.
John of Salisbury

... 123

103, 141

29, 115

23, 48, 105

KELLY, Rev. M. 7, 56

Kells, Synod of 104, 142

Kilkenny, Confederation of ... 123

LABBE 83, 87

Lanfranc 13, 141

Lanigan, Rev. Dr. 3, 114

Le Mans, Bishop of ... 105

Liber Niger Scaccani 16, 140

Limitation of King's power ... 107
Limitation of Pope's power ... 124
Lingard, Dr. ... 131

160

INDEX.

PAGE

Lisieux, Bishop of ... 105

j'.vci:
Policraticus ... 4S

Louis, King of France . . . 109

Possibility of forgery 21, 22, 27, 28

Lynch, Rev. John 55, 96, 100

REMONSTRANCE ... 115

Macaricf, Excidium ... 57

Retractations of Giraldus ... 99

Mac Morrough, Dermot ... 77

Richey ... 128

Malachy, St. ... 144

Rinuccini ... 123

Malone, Very Rev. Dr.

Robert de Monte ... 45

3, 6, 31, 58, 114, 119, 135, 148, 149

Roger, Archbishop of York ... 133

Marianus ... 103

Rotrodus, Bishop 105, 109, 112

Martyrless Ireland 67, 69
Merlin Celidon 75, 79

SALISBURY, John of 23, 48, 105

MetalogicuM 23, 26
Migne 16, 41, 87, 135, 147
Model Bull 109, 110, 112
Moran, Cardinal 3, 87, 106, 118, 138
Morris, Rev. W. B. 3, 41, 89
Murder of Becket 79, 135

Scotichronicon ... 118
SixtusIV. ... 30
Specialist, the Pope not a ... 124
St. Albans, Abbot of 36, 105, 109
Sylvester 12, 28
Synods 80, 83

THOMAS, St.

NEGATIVE, to prove a ... 150

39, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137

Nicholas V. ... 30

Tithes 12, 142

Nicholas of Wallingford ... 87

URBAN II. 11, 29

OATH that forgery had been

Ussher, James 3, 126

committed ... 43

O'Brien, Donough ... 114

VISIONS 75, 79

O'Callaghan, J. C. ... 57

Vivianus, Cardinal 73, 88

O'Connor, Roderick ... 112
O'Kelly, Colonel Charles ... 57
Oneyle, Donald ... 116

WARE, Sir James 68, 95
Wendover, Roger de 13, 106
Where are the Bulls ? ... 155

O'Rourke, Prince of Breifny 76
O'Toole, St. Laurence 64, 90, 126

White, Rev. Stephen, S.J. 3, 55, 74
Wilkins 87, 88

PAPARO, Cardinal ... 103

Winchester 31, 87

Paris, Matthew 13, 106

Wonders of Ireland ... 91

Paul IV. ... 119
Peter of Blois ... 115

YORK, Archbishop of ... 133

Pole, Cardinal ... 120

ZINKEISEN, Dr. ... 126

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