The deposition in September 1399 of King Richard II in favor of Henry of Lancaster, crowned King Henry IV, spelled the end of a period during which king and council had devoted rather more attention to events in Ireland than had traditionally been the case. The appointment of Lionel of Clarence as lieutenant in 1361 had inaugurated a relatively sustained effort to strengthen the English position in Ireland, culminating in Richard II’s two personal expeditions to Ireland with powerful armies royal. The results, however, fell far short of expectations. The new Lancastrian regime, moreover, had more pressing commitments elsewhere and more slender resources with which to discharge them. Initially, an attempt was made with the appointment as lieutenant in 1401 of Henry IV’s second son, Thomas of Lancaster, to maintain a substantial garrison to repress the Irish: Lancaster was promised 12,000 marks annually to maintain his estate, but actually received less than half this sum. By 1413, when Sir John Stanley was appointed lieutenant, the governor’s normal salary had been reduced to a more manageable £2,000 a year. Reports from royal officers in Ireland descended into graphic detail to explain to the king the dire consequences for the defense of the Englishry of this shortage of money and manmd—the weakness of the marches, growing raids by the Irish, destruction and rebellion all around. Yet, for king and court—and the English political nation more generally—events in Ireland, bad as they seemed, were simply not a priority.
Ireland and the English Monarchy
The fact was that the good rule and defense of "the king’s loyal English lieges" in Ireland had to be seen in the context of commitments elsewhere. Most important was the defense of the realm, threatened by invasion from Scots enemies to the north and a protracted uprising among "the mere Welsh" (1400-1415) which briefly (1403) attracted support from France and Brittany and also from the dissident earl of Northumberland. By the time internal dissension had been stamped out, the Hundred Years War with France had recommenced with sweeping English successes—the conquest of Normandy and large stretches of northern France, the occupation of Paris, and finally in 1422 the glittering prize of the French crown. Naturally, the exploitation of military victories on French battlefields took priority over petty raiding in the bogs of Ireland. The lordship’s military resources were again tapped to consolidate these new conquests. In 1419, the prior of Kilmainham led a force of 700 men to serve under Henry V at the siege of Rouen. Ireland’s premier earl, James Butler of Ormond, also participated, as he did in campaigns there from 1415 to 1416 and in 1430. Then from 1435, when the War turned sour, France remained a priority for different reasons, swallowing up scarce resources to shore up the crumbling English position.
The result was that little could be spared for Ireland, which ranked a bad fourth—after France and Scotland— in the regime’s priorities. Lord Treasurer Cromwell’s statement of royal income and expenditure presented to the English parliament in 1433 gives some insight into the overall position. Cromwell estimated the king’s ordinary annual income (excluding taxation) at £64,800, but projected ordinary expenditure (excluding the French war, which was supposedly self-sufficient) at £80,700. Grants of taxation would hopefully make up the difference, but substantial debts had also accumulated, amounting to £168,400. The government’s finances had probably deteriorated during Henry VI’s minority (1422-1437), but only peace or sweeping military success could stabilize the position. In these circumstances, nothing much could be expected for or from the Irish theater of operations: Cromwell estimated the king’s revenues there at £2,340 (a decidedly optimistic estimate), with expenditure at £5,026, thus leaving a deficit of almost £2,700 to be made good from England. By comparison, the financial deficit for the defense of Calais (costing almost £12,000) exceeded £9,000; that of Gascony (costing over £4,100) ran to £3,300; and defending the Anglo-Scottish frontier cost a further £4,800. Overall, the outlying territories provided a series of strategic posts and buttresses to defend the English mainland at a cost of £20,000.
The lordship’s primary significance in all of this was the string of royal port towns stretching south from Carrickfergus and around to Galway, which facilitated English naval control of the Irish and Celtic Seas and denied the island to any continental prince. Some of these port towns, notably Carrickfergus and Galway themselves, were effectively English military outposts in Gaelic Ireland, but others had extensive English hinterlands—the eastern coastal plain around Dublin, Drogheda, and Dundalk, and the Barrow-Nore-Suir river basin, the two densest areas of medieval English settlement. Here more fertile land had permitted the introduction of English manorialism and mixed farming with nucleated villages and market towns. Militarily, these formed a series of strong points along comparatively stable marches that were a good deal easier to defend from the perennial Gaelic raids than the more thinly populated pastoral regions where the marches were fluid and shifting. Also strategically important was the king’s highway down the Barrow valley connecting these two regions; but this was swept by Gaelic raids both from the midlands and the Leinster mountains. Yet what happened in the purely Gaelic parts—"the land of war" inhabited by "the wild Irish" living in their woods and bogs—was of little concern to the government.
What the beleaguered Lancastrian government aimed to do was to conduct a holding operation while addressing more pressing problems elsewhere. Successive governors could expect an annual salary of, at most, 4,000 marks—notably John Talbot, Lord Furnivall (later earl of Shrewsbury and Waterford), lieutenant from 1414 to 1420 and from 1445 to 1447; James Butler, earl of Ormond, a regular choice for two- or three-year periods between 1420 and his death in 1452; and Richard duke of York, lieutenant from 1447 to 1460. This salary, normally payable from the English exchequer, was intended to offset the deficit on the Irish revenues, so allowing governors to maintain an adequate force for defense, commonly 300 or 400 archers. Given that Waterford, Ormond, and York were the lordship’s leading landowners, each with an extensive manmd, these arrangements should in theory have been more than adequate. Yet, for various reasons, the reality was far different. Increased reliance on local landowners at this time promoted faction: the classic illustration was the escalating feud between Talbot and Butler. Besides encouraging Gaelic raids, the feud left the Dublin administration virtually paralyzed in the early 1440s. Yet outside governors without a local following obviously needed greater support. Escalating feuds between provincial magnates also epitomized the regime’s collapse elsewhere at this time—for want of impartial justice by the feeble Henry VI. Another indication of incipient collapse was the worsening financial situation. Already during Talbot’s first lieutenancy, the English exchequer’s failure to maintain the payments agreed in his indenture forced the lieutenant to resort to coign and livery to maintain his troops— that is, to billet them on the country and to purvey supplies for his household without payment. Later lieutenants generally received less of what was owed; deputies appointed during their long absences commanded still smaller resources; and at £500 the salary allowed to a justiciar elected by the council to fill a casual vacancy was modest indeed. In short, a governor with even 2,000 marks a year to maintain a small retinue was very much the exception, and little was available in Ireland by way of taxation—700 marks per subsidy, £300 from a scutage.
The Crisis of Lordship and the Descent to Civil War
The result was that intensive royal government on the lowland English model, supervised by the central courts, the governor, and council, was increasingly restricted to "the four obedient shires" around Dublin, the region later called "the English Pale," which supplied most of the king’s revenues. Here, the government encouraged the construction of towers and dikes in the marches to facilitate defense and inhibit cattle rustling. Elsewhere, however, apart from the predominantly self-governing royal towns, defense and good rule increasingly devolved on the region’s ruling magnate—notably, the earls of Desmond in the southwest, and Ormond in south Leinster, whose private armies of kerne and galloglass were maintained by coign and livery in the Gaelic manner. Central supervision was intermittent, in part because the Barrow valley was now passable only with an armed escort. Occasionally, when affairs around Dublin permitted, the governor might make a progress southwards, perhaps mounting a short campaign against "Irish enemies" and holding brief judicial sessions. Yet, conditions in the Barrow valley worsened markedly following the death in 1432 of the leading lord there, the earl of Kildare. Ormond had married Kildare’s daughter and secured most of the estates, but with no resident earl to defend them, outlying estates were overrun and key castles like Tullow and Castledermot were destroyed, thus undermining the whole march.
By the late 1440s, the English position was everywhere collapsing. The arrival as lieutenant in 1449 of the king’s heir apparent, Richard duke of York, briefly gave new heart to the Englishry: wholesale submissions by Gaelic chiefs prompted the rash prediction that within twelve months "the wildest Irishman in Ireland shall be swore English." Then news arrived of the final English collapse in Normandy: York demanded immediate support, "for I had liever be dead" than have it chronicled "that Ireland was lost by my negligence." Soon after, rebellion broke out in England, and York departed, leaving Ormond as his deputy. Yet Ormond’s death in 1452 was followed a year later by Waterford’s death in distant Gascony in the final English collapse there, and suddenly Ireland’s leading landowners were all absentees. Ormond and Waterford’s successors never visited their Irish estates. In the ensuing crisis of lordship, the king recognized as earl of Kildare Thomas FitzMaurice of the Geraldines, grandnephew of the last earl, in a bid to strengthen the southern marches of "the four shires." Yet by then English politics were sliding towards civil war: York built up strong support, retaining the earls of Desmond and Kildare, although the absentee earl of Ormond sided with the court party.
War began in earnest in 1459. The lordship’s potential as a retreat and recruiting ground for attempts on the throne was first appreciated by the Yorkists, the duke himself fleeing there after the rout of Ludford, while Warwick and York’s son, the earl of March, retired to Calais. During the winter of 1459-1460, Warwick visited York in Waterford to coordinate a two-pronged invasion of England, and the army raised for York’s attempt on the throne the following autumn drew solid support from the English of Ireland. Although York was killed soon after, his son claimed the throne as King Edward IV, and his ensuing victory at Towton, the greatest battle of the Wars of the Roses, left the Yorkists in control. In 1462, the defeated Lancastrians tried to emulate York’s strategy in reverse: a Lancastrian invasion of the lordship led by Ormond’s brother coincided with risings in the midlands and Meath on behalf of Henry VI. The Lancastrians briefly secured control of the Ormond heartland around Kilkenny and Tipperary, capturing Waterford city, but elsewhere there was little support for the feeble Henry VI, and the risings collapsed following the rebel defeat by Desmond at Pilltown.
Thereafter, the lordship remained solidly Yorkist. In 1470-1471, divisions within the Yorkist camp permitted Henry VI’s short-lived "readepcion." An Irish echo of this saw Kildare briefly heading a nominally-Lancastrian administration as deputy to Edward IV’s renegade brother, Lord Lieutenant Clarence. Yet this time Edward had no need of Irish support to recover the throne, and following news of Barnet and Tewkesbury Edward was promptly proclaimed. These events were in marked contrast, however, to the aftermath of Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth in 1485. Edward’s death in 1483 had precipitated new splits among the Yorkists, eventually allowing Henry Tudor to seize the throne. Yet the Irish administration now headed by Kildare’s son, the young 8 th earl, exhibited a marked reluctance to proclaim Henry VII, even going so far as to convene a parliament in Dublin in Richard III’s name fully two months after his death. It was to be another ten years before Tudor rule was fully accepted in English Ireland. In 1487, traditional loyalties remained sufficiently strong for the Yorkists to recover Ireland, crown an English king in Dublin, and then invade England with an army that was probably the largest raised there in 150 years. The Yorkist cause only finally expired at the siege of Waterford in 1495 when Desmond’s army and "King Richard" IV’s navy were dispersed by Sir Edward Poynings’ artillery.
It is not difficult to explain the lordship’s enthusiastic support for the Yorkists. We may discount York’s supposed concession of legislative independence in a Home Rule parliament in 1460; this underlined royal weakness at a time when the Englishry craved closer ties with the court, not less. The key factor was the close relationship between the Yorkist leadership and the 7th earl of Kildare. York’s retainer and deputy, Kildare was thereafter consistently favored by Edward IV, himself an experienced marcher lord and a far better judge of character than the saintly Henry VI. Kildare’s long tenure of the governorship and other indications of Edward’s favor, such as grants of land, enabled the earl to recover, restore, and extend his wasted ancestral possessions, expelling the Irish and fortifying the territory with towers and castles. His son, the 8th earl, continued this strategy, thereby also restoring the English position in Counties. Kildare and Carlow. This is not to say that relations between king and earl were invariably harmonious; there were clashes in 1468, 1478, and 1483. Yet, at bottom, Edward IV recognized (as the later Tudors did not) that good rule in a marcher society rested on reliable and resident marcher lords. Following the collapse of Lancastrian France, ruling magnates were the key to the English recovery in the remaining borderlands.
