In Ireland Henry had little to do save to enter into the labours of its first conquerors.  The Danes had been driven from the ports.  The Irish were broken and divided, and looked to him as their only possible ally and deliverer from the tyranny, the martial law, the arbitrary executions, which had marked the rough rule of the invaders.  The terrified barons were ready to buy their existence at any price.  The leaders of the Church welcomed him as the supporter of Roman discipline.  Henry used all his advantages.  He consistently carried through the farce of arbitration.  The Wexford men brought to him Fitz-Stephen, whom they had captured, as the greatest enemy to the royal majesty and the Irish people.  Henry threw him into prison, but as soon as he had won the smaller kings of the south separately to make submission to him, and given the chief castles into the hands of his own officers, he conciliated the knights by releasing Fitz-Stephen.  He spent the winter in Dublin, in a palace built of wattles after the fashion of the country.  There he received the homage of all the kings of Leinster and Meath.  Order, law, justice, took the place of confusion.  Dublin, threatened with ruin now the Danish traders were driven off, was given to the men of Bristol to found a new prosperity.  Its trade with Chester was confirmed, and from all parts of England new settlers came in numbers during the next few years to share in the privileges and wealth which its commerce promised.  A stately cathedral of decorated Norman work rose on the site of an earlier church founded by the Ostmen.  It seemed as though the mere military rule of the feudal lords was to be superseded under the king’s influence by a wiser and more statesmanlike occupation of the country.  A great council was held at Cashel, where a settlement was made of Church and State, and where Henry for the first time published the Papal Bull issued by Hadrian fifteen years before.  He had won a position of advantage from whence to open a new bargain with the Pope.  In the moment of his deepest disgrace and peril he defiantly showed himself before the world in all the glory of the first foreign Conqueror and Lord of Ireland.

Henry’s work, however, was scarcely begun when in March there came a lull in the long winter storms, and a vessel made its way across the waters of the Irish Sea.  It brought grave tidings.  Legates from the Pope had reached Normandy, with powers only after full submission to absolve the king; unless Henry quickly met them, all his lands would be laid under interdict.  Other heavy tidings came.  Evil counsellors were exciting the young king to rebellion.  It was absurd, they said, to be king, and to exercise no authority in the kingdom, and the boy was willing enough to believe that since his coronation “the reign of his father had expired.”  All Henry’s plans in Ireland were at once thrown aside.  At the first break in the adverse winds he hastily set sail, and for two hundred years no English king again