as was possible in such turbulent times.  It does not belong to our present subject to theorize on the origin or the grounds[291] of this power; it is sufficient to say that it had been exercised repeatedly both before and after Adrian granted the famous Bull, by which he conferred the kingdom of Ireland on Henry II.  The Merovingian dynasty was changed on the decision of Pope Zachary.  Pope Adrian threatened Frederick I., that if he did not renounce all pretensions to ecclesiastical property in Lombardy, he should forfeit the crown, “received from himself and through his unction.”  When Pope Innocent III. pronounced sentence of deposition against Lackland in 1211, and conferred the kingdom of England on Philip Augustus, the latter instantly prepared to assert his claim, though he had no manner of title, except the Papal grant.[292] In fact, at the very moment when Henry was claiming the Irish crown in right of Adrian’s Bull, given some years previously, he was in no small trepidation at the possible prospect of losing his English dominions, as an excommunication and an interdict were even then hanging over his head.  Political and polemical writers have taken strangely perverted views of the whole transaction.  One writer,[293] with apparently the most genuine impartiality, accuses the Pope, the King, and the Irish prelates of the most scandalous hypocrisy.  A cursory examination of the question might have served to prove the groundlessness of this assertion.  The Irish clergy, he asserts—­and his assertion is all the proof he gives—­betrayed their country for the sake of tithes.  But tithes had already been enacted, and the Irish clergy were very far from conceding Henry’s claims in the manner which some historians are pleased to imagine.

It has been already shown that the possession of Ireland was coveted at an early period by the Norman rulers of Great Britain.  When Henry II. ascended the throne in 1154, he probably intended to take the matter in hands at once.  An Englishman, Adrian IV., filled the Papal chair.  The English monarch would naturally find him favourable to his own country.  John of Salisbury, then chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was commissioned to request the favour.  No doubt he represented his master as very zealous for the interests of religion, and made it appear that his sole motive was the good, temporal and spiritual, of the barbarous Irish; at least this is plainly implied in Adrian’s Bull.[294] The Pope could have no motive except that which he expressed in the document itself.  He had been led to believe that the state of Ireland was deplorable; he naturally hoped that a wise and good government would restore what was amiss.  There is no doubt that there was much which required amendment, and no one was more conscious of this, or strove more earnestly to effect it, than the saintly prelate who governed the archiepiscopal see of Dublin.  The Irish clergy had already made the most zealous efforts to remedy whatever needed correction; but it was an age of lawless violence.  Reform was quite as much wanted both in England and in the Italian States; but Ireland had the additional disadvantage of having undergone three centuries of ruthless plunder and desecration of her churches and shrines, and the result told fearfully on that land which had once been the home of saints.