Princes of Ireland

  This was what Doyle had done. The accounts he submitted were always thorough, and seemed to be complete. And they were, nearly. But the tallies which MacGowan kept differed from Doyle’s official records by about ten percent. The goods which left Doyle’s strong house all bore his official stamp stating that customs dues had been paid. And so they had: but one shilling in ten had gone to him instead of to the Exchequer. An interesting variation on a theme, and even harder to check, was to stamp the goods and send them on at cost price to Bristol, where they could be landed duty free. The procedure was a little cumbersome, but he had used it once or twice as a favour to kinsmen or friends with whom he did business at the English port.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that one day he would be tempted to go further. The thought had occurred to him in the past, of course, but he probably would not have attempted it if MacGowan had not shown himself so skilled at managing the people at Dalkey. By the time that the opportunity—a truly splendid opportunity—had presented itself, MacGowan had convinced him that he could pull the business off successfully and safely. Yet even so, the powerful merchant had hesitated. The risks were large. Had he been caught in his usual skimming of the customs dues—and proving this would have been difficult anyway—he risked little more than a reprimand and a payment to the authorities. He might not even have lost his office. But this wholesale smuggling was another matter entirely. For a start, it meant involving not just his own man, but the whole of Dalkey. Discovery would have serious consequences: loss of office, a hefty fine, perhaps worse. The profit, the customs due on three entire shiploads of valuable goods, would be huge, but he was a rich man anyway and had no need of the money. So why did he do it?

  He’d asked the question of himself, and he thought he knew the answer. It was the risk. The difficulty and the danger of the thing were what really appealed to him. No doubt his distant Viking ancestors would have felt the same way. It was a long time since the powerful, saturnine merchant and city father had had any real excitement. This was an adventure on the high seas.

  The planning and logistics had been formidable. The three ships had to come from different ports, meet off the southern coast of Ireland, and proceed together. The goods had to be unloaded with incredible speed, in the dark; and then they had to be hidden and later on distributed for sale in several markets, without arousing suspicion. It was only after all these complex problems had been provided for that the huge difficulty had arisen—the sudden appearance of the squadron in Dalkey, to keep watch on the coast. As soon as he had reported this, MacGowan had assumed that the plans would have to be aborted.

  “I suppose it’s over,” he had said to Doyle sadly, and had been surprised when the merchant had calmly responded, “Not at all.”

  In fact, Doyle had rather enjoyed the extra challenge. How could he persuade the squadron to leave Dalkey? By convincing them that the enemy they were seeking was actually going to strike somewhere else. The castle of Carrickmines had been the obvious choice. But the merchant’s genius lay in the way it was done. It had been MacGowan who had put Tom Tidy into his mind originally, when he had warned him that the carter was the one person in Dalkey who would not be a party to the smuggling. “If he even guesses what’s going on, he’ll go straight to the authorities,” he had warned Doyle. “I’ve got to get him out of Dalkey for a while.”

  “Let us use Tidy to do our work for us then,” Doyle had told the astonished young fellow. It had been Doyle’s idea that Tidy should be followed when he went into the church to pray, and that he should overhear the conspirators planning the attack on Carrickmines. “You must pretend to dissuade him from telling anyone, if he comes to you for advice, as he probably will,” Doyle had instructed MacGowan. “That way, he’ll never dream that you’ve set him up. And if what you tell me about his character is correct, then our friend will go to the authorities anyway.”

  So it had proved. Both MacGowan and Doyle himself, when he had been called by the Justiciar, had played their parts to perfection. The plan to raid Carrickmines had been believed; the squadron had been withdrawn; the coast was clear again for the landing. But Doyle had not stopped there. In order for the thing to look convincing, he explained to MacGowan, “We’ll need a raid upon Carrickmines.”

  Only a man with the long reach of Doyle could have arranged such a thing—even MacGowan was not told how it was done—but word was carried to O’Byrne and a deal was struck. The Irish chief would lead a convincing-looking raid upon the castle in the middle of the night and make sure that his men drew the defenders well away from Dalkey. It seemed the plan had amused O’Byrne, and he had been well paid. Indeed, a fair amount of the profit of the operation had had to be sacrificed, but Doyle was too far in now to pull back. The Irishman had been warned of the danger from Harold and the squadron, but the risk of the operation had only added to its appeal. “In any case,” he had remarked, “my boys will melt into the night.” It was he himself who had sent the dark-haired girl to hang around at the castle and the harbour. “I’ve told her,” he promised Doyle, “to make sure that she is seen.”

  And so it had all been arranged. Doyle, of course, would never be seen. From Dublin, he could even deny any knowledge of the business at all; as for MacGowan, he knew very well that should things go wrong, Doyle would have him safely into hiding, and if necessary across the sea, before the Justiciar’s men ever got their hands on him.

  There had been only one problem. He had not realised how difficult it would be to get Tom out of Dalkey. He had done everything to frighten him back into Dublin, exactly as Doyle had suggested, with invented stories of danger and the calculated hostility of the Dalkey people; but when Tom had turned up again on the very eve of the landing, MacGowan had been in despair. In the end, Doyle himself had come to pull him out. The merchant had not been too pleased about that.

  However, MacGowan thought now, as he surveyed the successful completion of the night’s work, Doyle would probably forgive him before long for that one error in his calculations.

  It was three weeks later that John Walsh, riding up into the foothills, encountered the girl.

  Life had been relatively quiet at the castle of Carrickmines since the night of the raid. The plan to inflict a massive defeat upon O’Byrne had not succeeded. Several of his men, undoubtedly, had been wounded. But somehow, in the darkness, every one of them had managed to get away, although the search in the foothills had gone on well into the day. As for Harold and his party, they had finished up wandering around in the dawn, empty-handed, in the woods above Glendalough. The business had been a failure. Yet it was not long—less than a week—before it was accounted a success. “We gave them a fright. We sent them flying. That was a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry.” These were the verdicts that were soon on the Dublin people’s lips, such is the history of warfare.

  Walsh said nothing. He knew it had been a trick, a scam of some sort; but he hadn’t quite worked out of what kind. Obviously, O’Byrne had known what was going to happen. If he knew the troops would be waiting for him, then he must have wanted them to be there. As he considered the business further, however, it seemed to him that if O’Byrne, or whomever he was working with, wanted all the available military forces at Carrickmines, it could only mean that they did not want them to be somewhere else. So where had the troops come from? Dublin, Harold’s Cross, and Dalkey. Nothing that he knew of had happened at any of those places, but the more he thought about it, the more his suspicions centred on Dalkey. Perhaps he would never know, but he would remember and watch with interest in the future. Life on the frontier, he reflected with satisfaction, was never dull.

  She was lying on a rock in the sun. She must have fallen asleep; he’d never have come upon her like this otherwise. Her long, dark hair had cascaded down the side of the stone. She sprang up and flashed an angry glance at him, at which he only smiled. It amused him to remember that this fleet little figure was actually his cousin. She turned to run away, but he called after her
.

  “I’ve a message for you.”

  “You’ve nothing to say to me,” she cried back defiantly.

  “You’ll take a message to O’Byrne,” he answered. “Tell him,” he thought quickly, “tell him that my wrist is healing, but that I’ve nothing to show for my trouble.” He hadn’t planned any such message—he’d thought of it on the spur of the moment—but he was pleased with it. Then, before the girl could make any further response, he turned his horse’s head and rode away.

  It was a week later that, coming out of the castle soon after dawn, he found half a dozen kegs of wine had been left during the night just outside the gate.

  He smiled to himself. So that was the game. Dalkey was only just down the road from Carrickmines. Perhaps it was time, he thought, that the Walsh family started to take more of an interest in the place.

  EIGHT

  The Pale

  I

  IF HISTORIANS WISH to designate a date to mark the ending of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492 would seem a reasonable choice. In British history, convention has usually selected 1485; for in that year, the long feud now known as the Wars of the Roses between the York and Lancaster branches of the royal Plantagenet house was brought to an end when Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, was killed in battle by Henry Tudor. Under the new Tudor dynasty, England entered the world of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of exploration.

  But in the western island of Ireland, a better date must surely be just two years later, in the year 1487. For on May 24 of that year, the city of Dublin witnessed an event unique in Ireland’s history, and whose long-term repercussions were to be profound: the Irish set out to conquer England.

  The crowd outside Christ Church Cathedral was large. The great men of Ireland were all inside, as were most of the local gentry.

  “I wish we could go in, Father,” said the red-haired girl. “Weren’t we invited?”

  “Of course we were. But we got here too late,” he replied with a smile. “We’ll never get through the crowd now. Besides,” he added, “this is better. We shall see the procession as they come out.”

  Margaret Rivers looked at Christ Church eagerly. Her freckled face was pale with excitement, her blue eyes shining. She knew her family was important. She wasn’t sure exactly why, but she knew it must be true, because her father had told her. “And you, Margaret, are going to be a great success,” he would tell her.

  “How do you know, Father?” she would ask him.

  “Because you’re my special girl,” he’d reply, as she knew he was going to, and she would feel a little rush of happiness. She had three brothers, but she was the only girl, and she was the youngest. Of course she was his special girl. She wasn’t quite sure what she had to do to be a great success, but earlier that year, on her eighth birthday, her father had announced to the whole family: “Margaret will make a brilliant marriage. To a man of wealth and importance.” So she had supposed that success must be something to do with this.

  She knew her father was a wonderful man. Sometimes she had seen her mother cast her eyes up to heaven when he was speaking; she didn’t know quite what it meant, since her mother never said; but then her mother was subject, sometimes, to strange moods.

  The nuns always treated her father with the greatest respect when he visited the old convent. There were only seven of them, and one of these was deaf, but it seemed their lives were entirely in his hands. “Where would we be without you?” they used to say. Her father looked after all their affairs, managed their extensive lands, and advised them so that they never had to worry that their abbey’s large endowments would fail to support their few and modest needs. “We know we can always trust your dear father,” one of the faithful nuns remarked to little Margaret one day. “Your father is a gentleman.”

  A gentleman. Their house in the suburb of Oxmantown might be no different from those of the local merchants, but all over Fingal and beyond, Margaret knew, the landowners were, in one way or another, her kinsfolk. “We are related,” her father liked to say, “to every family of consequence in the Pale.”

  The Pale: that was what they called the counties around Dublin now—a name that suggested an invisible palisade enclosing the region. Conditions there were pretty much as they had been the century before. Within the Pale, as in England, lay a pattern of parishes and counties, where sheriffs collected royal taxes and the justices decided cases by English common law. Around the edge of the Pale, the Marcher lords still led their frontier existence; and beyond the Pale, whether ruled over by Irish chiefs or the great magnates like the Butlers and Fitzgeralds, lay the world of Gaelic Ireland. Beyond the Pale, as far as Margaret’s father was concerned, civilization ended. But within the Pale, order was assured by the English in Ireland, the Irish of English blood, men like himself: not, perhaps, all that he might have liked to be, but in his own eyes at least and those of the nuns, an English gentleman.

  Yet today, in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, gentlemen like himself were preparing to invade the English kingdom.

  “Look, Father.” The cathedral doors were swinging open. Men-at-arms were coming out, pushing back the crowd. A broad pathway was being cleared. Figures were appearing, in glittering robes, in the doorway. Her father lifted her up and Margaret could see them clearly: three bishops with mitres on their heads led the procession; then came the abbots and priors. Next, in their robes of office, red and blue and gold, came the mayor and the aldermen of the city; behind them walked the Archbishop of Dublin with the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, head of the mighty Fitzgerald clan and the most powerful man in all Ireland. Next came the Lord Chancellor, and the Treasurer, followed by the major officeholders and nobility. And then came the boy.

  He was only a little fellow, hardly older than herself. For a crown, they had taken a circlet of gold, which had formed the halo over a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and placed it upon his head. And to make sure that this new boy king should be clearly seen, they had selected a gentleman from Fingal, one Darcy by name, a giant of a man who stood six and a half feet tall, and put the boy king to ride upon his shoulders.

  Bringing up the rear of the procession came two hundred German mercenary landknechts, sent from the Low Countries by the Duchess of Burgundy, carrying fearsome pikes and accompanied by fife and drum.

  For the boy, Edmund, Earl of Warwick, had just been crowned King of England, and was about to set forth to claim his rightful kingdom. But how had it come to pass that he should be crowned in Dublin?

  A generation ago, during a period when the royal house of York was in the ascendant over that of Lancaster, one of the princes of York had governed Ireland for a number of years and, uncommon for an Englishman, had made himself popular. Ever since, in many parts of the Irish community, and especially in Dublin, there had been a loyalty towards the Yorkist cause. But now the House of York had been defeated. Henry Tudor, who held the crown by right of conquest, had based his claim to royalty on the fact that his forebears, though only an upstart gentry family from Wales, had married into the House of Lancaster. As royalty goes, this was quite a shaky claim; and although the new Tudor king cleverly married a Yorkist princess to strengthen his royal position, he could not really sleep easy if there were other, more legitimate Plantagenet heirs still at large.

  And suddenly, some months ago, an heir had appeared, with a far more legitimate claim to the throne than Henry Tudor. He was Edmund, Earl of Warwick, a royal prince of the house of York. His appearance under the care of a priest had caused consternation at the Tudor court. King Henry had immediately called him an impostor. “His real name is Lambert Simnel,” he declared, the son of an organ maker in Oxford—though the craftsman in question was conveniently dead. Then Henry produced another boy, whom he kept in the Tower of London, and announced that he was the real Edmund of Warwick. The trouble was that two of Edmund’s Plantagenet relations—one of them was the
Duchess of Burgundy, a Yorkist princess—having interviewed the two boys, both declared that the priest’s boy was indeed Edmund, and that Henry’s boy was a fake. For the boy’s own safety, the priest had brought him across to Ireland. And today he was being crowned.

  Yet however much they preferred the House of York, why would the great men of the English community of Ireland choose to defy the Tudor king? Seen from a later century it may seem strange, yet in the year 1487, after decades of power shifting back and forth between York and Lancaster, there was no particular reason to suppose that the only half-royal Henry Tudor would be able to keep his crown. If many of the great nobles believed they would be better off under a Yorkist prince than a Lancastrian conqueror, the bishops, abbots, and royal officials would hardly have crowned the boy if they weren’t honestly convinced that he was, indeed, the rightful heir.

  The procession had just started down the street when Margaret and her father were joined by a young man to whom her father remarked pleasantly, “Well, John, have you decided?”

  Her eldest brother, John. Like Margaret, he had inherited red hair from their mother’s family, for she had been a Harold. But where Margaret’s was dark, almost auburn, John’s was light and rose like a carrot-coloured flame from his head. Twenty years old, tall, athletic, to Margaret he had always been a hero. And never more so than today. For the last week he and his father had been discussing whether he should join the coming expedition. Now he announced: “I have, Father. I’m going with them.”

  “Very well.” Her father nodded. “I’ve been talking to a man who knows Thomas Fitzgerald. That’s the brother of Kildare himself, you know,” he explained to Margaret. “We’ll not have you going as a common foot soldier. I should hope that my son,” he added rather grandly, “would be shown some consideration.”

  “Thank you, Father.” Her brother smiled affectionately. He had a beautiful smile.