[1] Wendover, iv., 291.

The king swore that he would never make peace with the marshal, unless he threw himself on the royal mercy as a confessed traitor with a rope round his neck.  Having, however, exhausted all his military resources, he cunningly strove to entice Richard from Wales to Ireland.  The two Peters wrote to Maurice Fitzgerald, then justiciar of Ireland, and to the chief foes of the marshal, urging them to fall upon his Irish estates and capture the traitor, dead or alive.  Many of the most powerful nobles of Ireland lent themselves to the conspiracy.  The Lacys of Meath, his old enemies, joined with Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Marsh, and Richard de Burgh, the greatest of the Norman lords of Connaught, and the nephew of Hubert, in carrying out the plot.  The confederates fell suddenly upon the marshal’s estates and devastated them with fire and sword.  On hearing of this attack Richard immediately left Wales, and, accompanied by only fifteen knights, took ship for Ireland.  On his arrival Geoffrey Marsh, the meanest of the conspirators, received him with every profession of cordiality, and urged him to attack his enemies without delay.  Geoffrey was an old man; he had long held the great post of justiciar of Ireland; and he was himself the liegeman of the marshal.  Richard therefore implicitly trusted him, and forthwith took the field.

The first warlike operations of Earl Richard were successful.  After a short siege he obtained possession of Limerick, and his enemies were fain to demand a truce.  Richard proposed a conference to be held on April 1, 1234, on the Curragh of Kildare.  The conference proved abortive, for Geoffrey Marsh cunningly persuaded the marshal to refuse any offer of terms which the magnates would accept, and Richard found that he had been duped into taking up a position that he was not strong enough to maintain.  Marsh withdrew from his side, on the ground that he could not fight against Lacy, whose sister he had married.  The marshal foresaw the worst.  “I know,” he declared, “that this day I am delivered over to death, but it is better to die honourably for the cause of justice than to flee from the field and become a reproach to knighthood.”

The forsworn Irish knights slunk away to neighbouring places of sanctuary or went over to the enemy.  When the final struggle came, later on the same April 1, Richard had few followers save the faithful fifteen knights who had crossed over with him from Wales.  The little band, outnumbered by more than nine to one, struggled desperately to the end.  At last the marshal, unhorsed and severely wounded, fell into the hands of his enemies.  They bore him, more dead than alive, to his own castle of Kilkenny, which had just been seized by the justiciar.  After a few days Richard’s tough constitution began to get the better of his wounds.  Then his enemies, showing him the royal warranty for their acts, induced him to admit them into his castles.  An ignorant