A History of Ireland
Part 2: Regnum Hibernia
Chapter 3: John Darcy’s Wars, 1337-1349
The 1300’s had not been a good time for English governance in Ireland. The apocalyptic famine years of 1311-1319 had seen summers without sun. Williamite scholars assumed that tales of entire villages starving to death were exaggerations; we have now discovered enough mass graves overflowing with emaciated bodies to understand that, in this instance, the chroniclers were being entirely truthful. The scale of the disaster had been compounded when, at the height of the famine in 1315, Edward Bruce of Scotland invaded Ireland. The result was full-fledged civil war between the Anglo-Norman lords and a drastic erosion of the effective authority of the royal officers in Dublin. Edward was eventually defeated when his Anglo-Norman allies, who had grown disgusted at his army’s pillaging of the countryside for food at a time when peasants, prosperous or otherwise, and even members of the lower orders of the aristocracy were starving, defected back to the English crown.
Even though Edward was defeated at Faughart, the cat was out of the bag. The impotence of the king’s lieutenants had been put on show in the most spectacular way possible, and the Lords, Anglo-Norman and native Irish alike, began to simply ignore them. By 1330, writ of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland ran only in a thin strip of heavily anglicized costal land between Dublin and Dundalk, where just a generation ago it had been obeyed from Cork to Ulster. In 1333 William Donn de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, was assassinated; his lands were divided between three of his family members, all of whom claimed to be the sole true heir to the family’s massive holdings, and none of whom even bothered to pay lip-service to the powers in Dublin. The Lord Lieutenant was unable to do anything more than fume.
There would be no material help forthcoming from London. Edward III had restarted his grandfather’s wars in Scotland in 1333 with similar luck; despite a massive early victory at the Battle of Halidon Hill and the fall of Berwick, he was unable to control the countryside and by 1337 the Scots had taken back everything with the exception of a handful of southern military strong-points such as Sterling and Roxburgh. The war had sucked the English treasury dry, but Edward was nevertheless about to turn his sights towards the task which would consume the rest of his life—pressing his claim to the French throne. Edward viewed Ireland as little more than an impoverished backwater. He resolved to send nothing.
But, from the perspective of the Anglo-Normans who felt increasingly as though they were under siege in their heavily fortified pale, something immensely valuable had come out of Edward’s Scottish wars. That something was John Darcy. John was the second son of the English general and confidant of the king also named John Darcy. At the age of 16, he had proved himself leading a small force during the storming of Berwick; later that year, he had commanded the 500 men-at-arms on the extreme left of the English line at the Battle of Halidon Hill, where his quick-thinking prevented the collapse of the English flank. This incident made him a close friend of the King, only five years his elder, and until 1337 their relationship was characterized by immense mutual respect. In that year, however, John and Edward fell out over the king’s strategy in Scotland; Edward was moving away from a policy of direct invasion and towards one of containment in preparation for his French wars, while John continued to somewhat naively insist that one more decisive battle could destroy the Scots.
John was a soldier’s soldier, a personally courageous and charismatic leader who had a seemingly innate ability to get the absolute best out of his troops. He slept on the same ground as them and made of habit of entering into conversation (and drinking contests) with his common troops. He had a well-deserved reputation for tactical brilliance. He was the sort of man who men knew could lead them to the gates of Hell and back. But for every one of his positive traits he had a negative to go along with it: he was nearly illiterate (probably due to dyslexia) and would never grasp the art of governance. John had no understanding of the craft of political diplomacy, especially when the said politics involved a temper as vitriolic as Edward’s. When he went so far as to publicly lambaste the king’s strategy as cowardice at a council of war, he overstepped his bounds.
Edward sent John into what amounted to internal exile as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (the previous one, remarkable only for his inability to stem the erosion of his own power, had just died). To ensure that John would never use Ireland as a power base for a rebellion against him, Edward split the authority of the Lord Lieutenancy so that, while John was still Lord Lieutenant and would command the Irish levees in time of war, effective day-to-day administration would reside in the impeccably loyal and levelheaded person of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Thomas of Chester. It was a match made in heaven. Thomas of Chester was a consummate administrator and politician who, though initially sent as Edward’s personal
commissaire, quickly became John’s closest confidant and personal friend. Together, they would conquer Ireland.
Ireland circa the arrival of John and Thomas; areas theoretically acknowledging the overlordship of the English crown are in red, while those areas which are under the effective control of the Lord Lieutenant are outlined in black.
