Anglo-Irish relations were given constitutional expression when King Henry II of England (1154-1189) came to Ireland in 1171 and took the formal submission of the Irish kings. Yet given the geographical proximity of Britain and Ireland, it is certain there had always been interactions between the peoples of the two islands. Ireland was not absorbed by the Roman Empire, despite the claim of the historian Tacitus that the governor of Roman Britain from 77-83 C.E., Agri-cola, contemplated an invasion. Contact with Roman Britain took the form of raiding and trading. In the early medieval period, Irish missionaries were influential in Britain, and political relations with Scotland and Wales were intimate. Dating Ireland’s contact with England is more problematic. Unlike Ireland, the peoples that made up England were culturally diverse. The English kingdom was a comparatively recent invention, the very word Engla-lnd only appearing in the late tenth century. Before a certain point, therefore, it may be nonsensical to talk of "Anglo-Irish" relations. For a brief period in the tenth century, the Viking kings of Dublin were also kings of York. But although this is evidence of contact, it is questionable whether it should be dubbed "Anglo-Irish" relations.
On the other hand, it seems that the Viking fleets of Ireland were coveted by the Anglo-Saxon kings, and in the eleventh century Ireland’s contacts with England come into focus. At the time of the Norman conquest of England, the sons of Harold Godwinsson sought refuge in Ireland from the Normans. It seems that the Norman kings of England aspired to control Ireland. According to his death notice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, had William "the Conqueror" (1066-1087) lived two more years, "he would have conquered Ireland by his prudence and without any weapons." Giraldus Cambrensis records that the conqueror’s son, William II "Rufus" (1087-1100) gazed from the coast of Wales towards Ireland and boasted that "For the conquest of the land, I will gather all the ships of my kingdom, and will make of them a bridge to cross over."
The interest was not all from predatory English kings. The archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc (d. 1089), claimed—partly on the basis of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History—to be primate of all Britain, including Ireland. This claim was given some foundation when the bishop-elect of Dublin, Gille-Patraic, went to him for consecration in 1074. Moreover, Lanfranc professed to be doing no more than following the practice of his predecessors. The Irish link with Canterbury brought with it relations with English monastic foundations such as St. Albans and Winchester.
These ecclesiastical contacts were supplemented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by political connections. Ireland’s long association with Welsh politics, including the fact that the founder of the Welsh ruling dynasty of Gwynedd, Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), was born in Dublin, inevitably brought it into contact with the Normans occupying the Welsh march. The king of Munster and high king, Muirchertach Ua Briain (d. 1119), had a Norman son-in-law in the lord of Pembroke, Arnulf de Montgomery. And in 1165, the year before Diarmait Mac Murchada was expelled from Leinster and sought military aid from King Henry II, the native Welsh chronicle reported that a fleet from Dublin (a town under Diarmait’s control) came to Henry II’s aid in his abortive campaign against the native Welsh.
England and the Lordship of Ireland
Ireland’s connection with England was, therefore, long standing by the 1160s. But the Anglo-Norman invasion, and more particularly the expedition of Henry II of 1171-1172, brought England and Ireland into a formal relationship that has present-day ramifications. King Henry II became the "lord of Ireland" and the land of Ireland became vested in the English crown. There was large-scale peasant migration from England to settle the new acquisition, and with the settlers came English institutions, law, castles, and the introduction of a manorial economy.
It is wrong to imagine that Henry II was forced into this relationship with Ireland by the actions of Anglo-Norman adventurers led by Strongbow. No less than his predecessors, Henry II was happy to add Ireland to his empire. It has been suggested that the notorious papal privilege Laudabiliter (1155), which sanctioned an invasion of Ireland, was sought by the archbishops of Canterbury in order to regain primacy over the Irish Church; but if so, the archbishops required royal support. Moreover, there is evidence that, as early as 1155, Henry II was planning to make Ireland an appanage for his brother William. The Anglo-Normans who travelled to Ireland to aid Mac Murchada from 1167 did so with the consent of King Henry II. If they briefly believed they could act independently of the king of England, then Henry II’s expedition of 1171-1172 stamped royal authority on Ireland.
One consequence of the invasion was that "Anglo-Irish relations" came to mean the connections between England and the English colonists in Ireland. The Gaelic population was rapidly eliminated from the equation. In the thirteenth century there were sparse contacts, such as when the king of Connacht, Feidlim Ua Conchobair (d. 1265), fought in the Welsh campaign of King Henry III in 1245. But Gaelic contact with the king of England was exceptional rather than commonplace.
Ireland’s exact constitutional position in relation to England was initially ambiguous, and various plans were made for the lordship. In 1177 the lordship of Ireland was granted to the king’s fourth son, John (d. 1216), the future king of England. It may be that Henry II intended that Ireland would descend as a kingdom in the cadet line of the English royal house, though probably remaining subject to the overlordship of the king of England. A crown was sent by the pope to make the Irish monarchy a reality, but the scheme was not put into effect. When John became king of England in 1199, Ireland once again became vested in the kingship of England. The constitutional position of Ireland was clarified in 1254. In that year King Henry III (1216-1272) granted Ireland to his eldest son Edward, the future king. However, Henry III stipulated that Ireland should never be alienated from the English crown. He retained the ultimate authority over Ireland for himself, and on Edward’s succession in 1272 the two lands were once again reunited. This remained the situation until King Henry VIII adopted the title "King of Ireland" in 1541.
The key figure then in the relationship between Ireland and England was the English king. He was lord of Ireland and was required to protect his subjects there. Yet he was most notable for his absence. Henry II and his son John both visited Ireland. But after 1210, despite some good intentions, the only medieval king to visit the lordship personally was Richard II (1377-1399), who made two expeditions, in 1394-1395 and 1399. It is difficult to assess the impact of this absenteeism. Exhortations to the king to visit Ireland and remedy the colonists’ ills became frequent from the fourteenth century. But it is unclear what—short of an aspirational renewed conquest— would have strengthened the lordship. There is a strange tendency among Irish historians to favor Kings John and Richard II, seemingly on the sole basis that they crossed the Irish Sea. In fact their expeditions were in many ways damaging and patently unrealistic.
Neglect of Ireland stemmed from the king’s preoccupation with other enterprises, in Britain and in continental Europe. In the thirteenth century Ireland was exploited to fund Edward I’s campaigns against Wales and Scotland. From the fourteenth century, however, amid the hardship provoked by the Bruce invasion, the Black Death and the Gaelic revival, Ireland ceased to be profitable. It was hoped that the expedition of Lionel of Clarence in the 1360s would rejuvenate the colony so that it could contribute to England’s continental campaigns. This naive policy climaxed with Richard II’s expeditions of the 1390s. It foundered when Richard II lost his crown to Henry Bolingbroke while in Ireland in 1399.
The later medieval period is complicated by the growth of a "middle nation" among the colonists in Ireland, sometimes called the "Anglo-Irish" by historians. This group referred to themselves as English and always insisted that they were loyal to the king. Yet their growing awareness of a discrete identity from England arguably altered the constitutional position of Ireland. The Irish parliament of 1460 declared that "the land of Ireland is, and at all times has been, corporate of itself . . . freed from any special burden of the law of the realm of England." It is still debated whether this declaration had any historical foundation. But, in a sense, that is irrelevant. The important point is that the voice of the Irish colony—the parliament— declared that Ireland was separate, not from the king, but from the kingdom of England.
The growing alienation of Ireland from England had become dangerous by the end of the medieval period, particularly after the Tudor dynasty won the crown in 1485. In 1487, in an act of extraordinary defiance, a boy called Lambert Simnel was crowned as King Edward VI at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. In 1494, a second pretender called Perkin Warbeck found support in Ireland. Yet more insidious were the conspiracies of Anglo-Irish lords and England’s international enemies. Ireland was becoming a strategic liability. This fear that Ireland could be used as a "backdoor" into England—a fear that was realized several times in the modern era—came to be the predominant factor in English policy towards Ireland.
The administration of Henry VIII (1509-1544) recognized that the Irish problem had to be addressed. One response to the Kildare rebellion of 1534-1535 was the decision to change the constitutional position of the king. In 1541, King Henry VIII adopted the title "King of Ireland," rather than merely "lord," in an attempt to make the entire population amenable to English law and customs. The lordship of Ireland had at last become a kingdom. Ultimately the policy of accommodation faltered, and it became apparent to English administrators that the only solution was a renewed conquest and plantation of the country. The legacy of this policy is the embitterment that has characterized so much of Anglo-Irish relations into modern times.
