as they seemed to the race of Nesta’s descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers, who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery of the first conquest were despised and cast aside.  Divisions of race which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full intensity; and added to the two races of the Irish and the Danes we now hear of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken—­the Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border.  To the new comers the natives were simply barbarians.  When the Irish princes came to do homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings hearing their tale, refused to do fealty.  Any allies who still remained were alienated by being deprived of the lands which the first invaders had left them.  Even the newly-won Church was thrown into opposition by interference with its freedom and plunder of its lands; the ancient custom of carrying provisions to the churches for safe keeping in troubled times was contemptuously ignored when a papal legate gave the English armies leave to demand the opening of the church doors, and the sale of such provisions as they chose to require.  There were complaints too in the country of the endless lawsuits that now sprang up, probably from the infinite confusion that grew out of the attempt to override Irish by English law.  But if Glanville tried any legal experiments in Ireland, his work was soon interrupted.  Papal legates arrived in England at Christmas 1186 to crown the King of Ireland with the crown of peacocks’ feathers woven with gold which the Pope himself had sent.  But John never wore his diadem of peacocks’ feathers.  Before it had arrived he had been driven from the country.

Thus ended the third and last attempt in Henry’s reign to conquer Ireland.  The strength and the weakness of the king’s policy had alike brought misery to the land.  The nation was left shattered and bleeding; its native princes weakened in all things save in the habits of treachery and jealousy; its Danish traders driven into exile; its foreign conquerors with their ranks broken, and their hope turned to bitterness.  The natural development of the tribal system was violently interrupted by the half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for which the Irish were wholly unprepared.  But the feudal conquerors themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred years earlier.  Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set nothing in its place.  There remained at last only the shattered remnants of two civilizations which by sheer force were maintained side by side.  Their fusion was perhaps impossible, but it was certainly rendered less possible by the perplexed and arbitrary interferences of later rulers in England, almost as foreign to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as to the native tribes who, axe in hand and hidden in bog and swamp and forest, clung desperately to the ancient traditions and inheritance of their forefathers.