t acknowledge the supremacy of Rome and was heretical on certain
points of doctrine, is a question outside the present subject. The
Bulls are only quoted here as showing the part taken by Rome. And it
must be admitted that in the succeeding century the power of the Pope
became strong enough to enable him to levy taxes in Ireland for the
purpose of carrying on his wars against the Emperor and the King of
Aragon.

But Henry did not conquer Ireland. He did not even pretend to do so.
Previous to his arrival there had been some little fighting done by a
few adventurous Norman knights who had been invited by a native chief
to assist him in a domestic war; but Henry II fought no battle in
Ireland; he displaced no ancient national government; the Irish had
no national flag, no capital city as the metropolis of the country, no
common administration of the law. The English, coming in the name of
the Pope, with the aid of the 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 th