Irish bishops, with a superior national organization which the Irish easily recognised, were accepted by the Irish.  The king landed at Waterford; his journey to Dublin was rather a royal progress than a hostile invasion.  He came as feudal sovereign to receive the homage of the Irish tribes; the chiefs flocked to his court, readily became his vassals, and undertook to hold the lands they already occupied as fiefs of the Crown.  But Henry did not take the title, or assume the position of King of Ireland.  He merely sought to establish a suzerainty in which he would be the overlord.  And in fact a conquest of Ireland in the modern sense of the term would have been impossible.  England possessed no standing army; the feudal levies of mediaeval times were difficult and expensive.  It might of course have been possible to have organized a wholesale immigration and an enslavement of the natives, something like that which the Normans had accomplished in England, and the Saxons had done centuries before; but nothing of the kind was attempted.  Whether Henry’s original intention was simply to leave the Irish chiefs in possession or not, it is useless now to enquire.  But if it was, he appears to have changed his views; for not long afterwards he granted large fiefs with palatinate jurisdiction to various Normans who had made their way over to Ireland independently.

It may be that Henry—­knowing that the Conqueror, whilst taking care that no powerful seignories should grow up in the heart of his kingdom, as rivals to the throne, yet made exceptions in cases where the lands verged on hostile territory, such as Durham or Chester—­thought that he could best follow the spirit of that policy by establishing what were practically semi-independent principalities in an island already inhabited by another race.  But the result was disastrous.

That the Normans were savage and brutal, dealing out no justice or mercy to their victims, is proved by the account of their conquest of England.  Yet they possessed certain great qualities, which eminently fitted them to become rulers in those wild, unsettled times; as their successes, not merely in Britain, but also in Southern Italy and Syria, show.  They had the idea of a strong, centralized Government; and more than that they had a marvellous capacity for receptivity.  Thus we see that in England, after a period of rough tyranny, they blended the existing Anglo-Saxon Government—­the strength of which lay in its local organization—­with their own; and from the union of the two has come the British Constitution.  So too in the Lowlands of Scotland it was the Norman knight Robert Bruce who, accepting the already existing Saxon and Roman civilization, raised Scotland into a powerful kingdom.  But in Ireland all was different.  The only state of society which the Normans found was Celtic barbarism.  Political institutions did not exist.  As the Normans in England had become Anglified, and in Scotland Scottified, so in Ireland they became Ersefied.