such
knights as were supposed most likely to hold them for the crown. Castles
were erected throughout the country, which was portioned out among
Henry's needy followers; and, for the first time in Ireland, a man was
called a rebel if he presumed to consider his house or lands as his own
property.

The winter had been so stormy that there was little communication with
England; but early in spring the King received the portentous
intelligence of the arrival of Papal Legates in Normandy, and learned
that they threatened to place his dominions under an interdict, if he
did not appear immediately to answer for his crime. Queen Eleanor and
his sons were also plotting against him, and there were many who boldly
declared that the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury would yet be
fearfully avenged. Henry determined at once to submit to the Holy See,
and to avert his doom by a real or pretended penitence. He therefore
sailed for England from Wexford Harbour, on Easter Monday, the 17th of
April, 1172, and arrived the same day at Port Finnen, in Wales. We give
the testimony of Cambrensis, no friend to Ireland, to prove that neither
clergy nor laity benefited by the royal visit. He thus describes the
inauguration of that selfish system of plunder and devastation, to which
Ireland has been subjected for centuries--a system which prefers the
interests of the few to the rights of the many, and then scoffs bitterly
at the misery it has created: "The clergy are reduced to beggary in the
island; the cathedral churches mourn, having been deprived, by the
aforesaid persons [the leading adventurers], and others along with them,
or who came over after them, of the lands and ample estates which had
been formerly granted to them faithfully and devoutly. And thus the
exalting of the Church has been changed into the despoiling or
plundering of the Church." Nor is his account of the temporal state of
the kingdom any better. He informs us that Dermod Mac Murrough, the
originator of all those evils, "oppressed his nobles, exalted upstarts,
was a calamity to his countrymen, hated by the strangers, and, in a
word, at war with the world." Of the Anglo-Norman nobles, who, it will
be remembered, were his own relatives, and of their work, he writes
thus: "This new and bloody conquest was defiled by an enormous effusion
of blood, and the slaughter of a Christian people." And again: "The
lands even of the Irish who stood faithful to our cause, from the fi