LANCASTRIAN-YORKIST IRELAND
LANCASTRIAN-YORKIST IRELAND
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 appoint-
ment 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 nor-
mal 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 manræd—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 impor-
tant was the defense of the realm, threatened by inva-
sion 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 accu-
mulated, 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 esti-
mated 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 but-
tresses 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 settle-
ment. Here more fertile land had permitted the introduc-
tion 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
fluidand 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