Nor is it difficult to understand the motives which led to these changes.  The position of an Irish chieftain—­with his practically limitless powers of life and death, his wild retinue of retainers whose only law was the will of their chief—­offered an irresistible temptation to men of their type, and had many more charms than the narrow and uninteresting role of liegeman to a king whom they never saw, and the obeying of whose behests brought them harm rather than good.  England had shown only too plainly that she had no power to protect her Irish colonists, of what use therefore, it was asked, for them to call themselves any longer English?  The great majority from that moment ceased to do so.  Save within the “five obedient shires” which came to be known as the English Pale, “the king’s writ no longer ran.”  The native Irish swarmed back from the mountains and forests, and repossessed themselves of the lands from which they had been driven.  No serious attempts were made to re-establish the authority of the law over three-fourths of the island.  Within a century and a half of the so-called conquest, save within one small and continually narrowing area, Ireland had ceased even nominally to belong to England.

[Illustration:  TRIM CASTLE ON THE BOYNE.]

XVI.

THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY,

It was not to be expected, however, that the larger country would for very shame let her possessions thus slip from her grasp without an effort to retain them, certainly not when a ruler of the calibre of an Edward III. came to the helm.  Had his energies been able to concentrate themselves upon Ireland the stream which was setting dead against loyalty might even then have been turned back.  The royal interest would have risen to the top of faction, as it did in England, and would have curbed the growing and dangerous power of the barons.  That magic which surrounds the word king might—­who can say that it would not?—­have awakened a sentiment at once of patriotism and loyalty.

Chimerical as it may sound even to suppose such a thing, there seems no valid reason why it might not have been.  No people admittedly are more intensely loyal by nature than the native Irish.  By their failings no less than their virtues they are extraordinarily susceptible to a personal influence, and that devotion which they so often showed towards their own chiefs might with very little trouble have been awakened in favour of a king.  It is one of the most deplorable of the many deplorable facts which stud the history of Ireland that no opening for the growth of such sentiment was ever once presented—­certainly not in such a form that it would have been humanly possible for it to be embraced.