I am inclined to credit Henry with having at one time intended to keep it. I think there are indications that he was in a certain sense coerced by his Norman lords into the abandonment, or at least the alteration, of his original policy, plans, and intentions as to Ireland, which were quite too peaceful and afforded too little scope for plunder to please those adventurers. In fact the barons revolted against the idea of not being allowed full scope for robbing the Irish; and one of them, De Courcy, resolved to fling the king's restrictions overboard, and set off on a conquering or freebooting expedition on his own account! A historian tells us that the royal commissioner Fitzadelm was quite unpopular with the colony. "His tastes were not military; he did not afford sufficient scope for spoiliation; and he was openly accused of being too friendly to the Irish. De Courcy, one of his aides in the government, became so disgusted with his inactivity, that he set out, in open defiance of the viceroy's prohibition, on an expedition to the north. Having selected a small army of twenty-two knights and three hundred soldiers, all picked men, to accompany him, by rapid marches he arrived the fourth day at Downpatrick, the chief city of Ulidia, and the clangor of his bugles ringing through the streets at the break of day, was the first intimation which the inhabitants received of this wholly unexpected incursion. In the alarm and confusion which ensued, the people became easy victims, and the English, after indulging their rage and rapacity, entrenched themselves in a corner of the city. Cardinal Vivian, who had come as legate from Pope Alexander the Third to the nations of Scotland and Ireland, and who had only recently arrived from the Isle of Man, happened to be then in Down, and was horrified at this act of aggression. He attemped to negotiate terms of peace, and proposed that De Courcy should withdraw his army on the condition of the Ulidians paying tribute to the English king; but any such terms being sternly rejected by De Courcy, the Cardinal encouraged and exhorted Mac Dunlevy, the king of Ulidia and Dalarania, to defend his territories manfully against the invaders. Coming as this advice did from the Pope's legate we may judge in what light the grant of

Ireland to king Henry the Second was regarded by the Pope himself."

It became clear that whatever policy or principles Henry might originally have thought of acting on in Ireland, he should abandon them and come into the scheme of the barons, which was, that he should give them free and full license for the plunder of the Irish, and they in return, would extend his realm. So we find the whole aim and spirit of the royal policy forthwith altered to meet the piratical views of the barons.

One of Roderick's sons, Murrogh, rebelled against and endeavored to depose his father (as the sons of Henry endeavored to dethrone him a few years subsequently), and Milo de Cogan, by the lord deputy's orders, led a Norman force into Connaught to aid the parricidal revolt! The Connacians, however, stood by their aged king, shrank from the rebellious son, and under the command of Roderick in person gave battle to the Normans at the Shannon. De Cogan and his Norman treaty-breakers and plunder-seekers were utterly and disastrously defeated; and Murrogh, the unnatural son, being captured, was tried for his offence by the assembled clans, and suffered the eric decreed by law for his crime.

This was the first deliberate rent in the treaty by the English. The next was by Henry himself, who, in violation of his kingly troth, undertook to dub his son John, yet a mere child, either lord or king of Ireland, and by those plausible deceits and diplomatic arts in which he proved himself a master, he obtained the approbation of the Pope for his proceeding. Quickly following upon these violations of the treaty of Windsor, and suddenly and completely changing the whole nature of the relations between the Irish and the Normans as previously laid down, Henry began to grant and assign away after the most wholesale fashion, the lands of the Irish, apportioning amongst his hungry followers whole territories yet unseen by an English eye! Naturalists tell how the paw of a tiger can touch with the softness of velvet or clutch with the force of a vice, according as the deadly fangs are sheathed or put forth. The Irish princes had been

treated with the velvet smoothness; they were now to be torn by the lacerating fangs of that tiger grip to which they had yielded themselves up so easily.

XXI.-DEATH-BED SCENES.

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T is a singular fact one which no historian avoid particularly noticing -that every one of the principal actors on the English side in this eventful episode of the first Anglo-Norman invasion, ended life violently, or under most painful circumstances.

Murrogh the traitor died, as we have already seen, of a mysterious disease, by which his body became putrid while yet he lingered between life and death. Strongbow died under somewhat similar circumstances; an ulcer in his foot spread upwards, and so eat away his body that it almost fell to pieces. Strongbow's son was slain by the father's hand. The death-bed of king Henry the Second was a scene of

horror. He died cursing with the most fearful maledictions his own sons! In vain the bishops and ecclesiastics surrounding his couch, horror-stricken, sought to prevail upon him to revoke these awful imprecations on his own offspring! "Accursed be the day on which I was born; and accursed of God be the sons that I leave after me," were his last words.* Far different is the spectacle presented to us in the deathscene of the hapless Irish monarch Roderick! Misfortunes in every shape had indeed overwhelmed him, and in his last hours sorrows were multiplied to him. "Near the junction of Lough Corrib with Lough Mask, on the boundary line between Mayo and Galway, stand the ruins of the once populous monastery and village of Cong. The first Christian kings of Connaught had founded the monastery, or enabled St. Fechin to do so by their generous donations. The father of Roderick had enriched its shrine by the gift of a particle of the true cross, reverently enshrined in a reliquary, the workmanship of which still excites the admiration of antiquaries. Here Roderick retired in the seventieth year of his age, and for twelve years thereafter-until the 29th day of November, 1198 here he wept and prayed and withered away. Dead to the world, as the world to him, the opening of a new grave in the royal corner at Clonmacnoise was the last incident connected with his name which reminded Connaught that it had lost its once prosperous prince, and Ireland, that she had seen her last Ard-Righ, according to the ancient Milesian constitution. Powerful princes of his own and other houses the land was destined to know for many generations, before its sovereignty was merged in that of England, but none fully entitled to claim the high sounding but often fallacious title of Monarch of all Ireland."

One other death-bed scene, described to us by the same. historian, one more picture from the Irish side, and we shall take our leave of this eventful chapter of Irish history, and the actors who moved in it. The last hours of Roderick's ambassador, the illustrious archbishop of Dublin, are thus

Mandit soit le jour ou je suis né ; et mandits de Dieu soient les fils qui je laisse."

described: "From Rome he returned with legatine powers which he used with great energy during the year 1180. In the autumn of that year, he was intrusted with the delivery to Henry the Second of the son of Roderick O'Conor, as a pledge for the fulfilment of the treaty of Windsor, and with other diplomatic functions. On reaching England he found the king had gone to France, and following him thither, he was seized with illness as he approached the monastery of Eu, and with a prophetic foretaste of death, he exclaimed, as he came in sight of the towers of the convert, 'Here shall I make my resting place.' The Abbot Osbert and the monks of the order of St. Victor received him tenderly and watched his couch for the few days he yet lingered. Anxious to fulfil his mission, he despatched David, tutor of the son of Roderick, with messages to Henry, and awaited his return with anxiety. David brought him a satisfactory response from the English king, and the last anxiety only remained. In death, as in life, his thoughts were with his country. Ah, foolish and insensible people,' he exclaimed in his latest hours,' what will become of you? Who will relieve your miseries? Who will heal you?' When recommended to make his last will he answered with apostolic simplicity: God knows out of all my revenues I have not a single coin to bequeath.' And thus on the 11th of November, 1180, in the forty-eighth year of his age, under the shelter of a Norman roof, surrounded by Norman mourners, the Gaelic statesman-saint departed out of this life bequeathing one more canonized memory to Ireland and to Rome."