It was a seminal circumstance for the fortunes of the Hospital in Ireland that the Norman conquest of that country took place under the leadership of Richard de Clare, second Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow, the head of a family which distinguished itself beyond all others in the extent of its donations to the Order. After seizing Dublin, Strongbow made to the Hospitallers about 1174 a rich donation at Kilmainham on the outskirts of the city, where the prioral seat was fixed. An earlier donation had appeared two years previously at Wexford, the first foothold of the Normans in the country; the town had originally been granted to Richard FitzStephen and the Fleming Maurice de Prendergast, who appears in 1202 as first Prior of Kilmainham. If the fief of the Clares in Pembrokeshire served as a model for their Irish colonisation, it is easy to understand the prominence of the Hospitallers, whose preceptory of Slebech had already acquired substantial wealth and doubtless corresponding prestige in the life of the Norman-Welsh colony. By 1212 the Priory of Ireland or Kilmainham possessed at least twelve further preceptories, distributed among all the Irish provinces except Connaught. Compared with the mere six houses accumulated by the Templars, this wealth of endowment reverses the position of England and Scotland and reflects the exceptional favour the Hospital received from the Norman aristocracy, whose grants were the chief source of foundations.
The Order of St John was unmistakably an arm of the Anglo-Norman ascendancy. In the reign of Henry III the royal tax-collectors were ordered to hand over their proceeds to the Prior of Kilmainham, whose experience in passing on such sums to London evidently recommended him for the task. A glimpse of the economic role of the military orders is given by the fact that at this period they were the main distributors of flour throughout the whole of Ireland. Preceptories generally took the form of fortified manor houses and stood as strongholds of Englishness in the surrounding Gaelic world.* In 1274 the
Prior William FitzRoger was captured and many of his companions killed in battle against native rebels; he escaped and was given command of the castle of Rindown and of the army which the King intended for the conquest of Connaught. A later Prior, Sir William Boss, served in 1299 as Lord Deputy of Ireland, the first of four Priors of Kilmainham to head the island’s government, while a further seven appear as Lord Chancellor.
A consequence of this colonial usefulness was that the Hospital encountered less difficulty than in England in laying its hands on the Templar legacy; here the strengthening of Hospitaller influence was a development which the monarchy welcomed. Difficulties came more from the resurgence of Gaelic power, and in particular the ravaging of Ireland by the Scots between 1315 and 1318. As the English colony contracted, the preceptory of Ards was virtually lost in the early fourteenth century, because it lay in the lands of the McGuinesses and O’Neills in which the King’s writ no longer ran.
At the same time the Priory of Kilmainham began to pass from English to Irish hands. From 1311 to 1340 the office was held by the Irish
* But not necessarily cut off from it: when Richard II visited Ireland his interpreter was ‘a certain Hospitaller learned in the Irish tongue’.
Kilmainham Hospital, Dublin, showing the original chapel of the prioral palace (right).
Knight Sir Roger Outlawe, who was also Lord Justice of the kingdom. The Priory came under the increasing control of the great Irish families. Sir Thomas Butler, who held it from 1404 to 1418, was an illegitimate son of the Earl of Ormonde; he served as Lord Deputy (1409—13) and in 1418 led a strong Irish force to France, where he distinguished himself at the siege of Rouen and died on active service. In the middle years of the century the prioral dignity was being fought over by two knights of the houses of Fitzgerald and Talbot, who alternately ousted each Other and found themselves deposed for maladministration.
They were succeeded by Sir James Keating, not himself a magnate but a henchman of the Earl of Kildare, who was then Lord Deputy; when he was removed, Keating as commander of Dublin Castle prevented his replacement from taking up his office, and the King was obliged to reinstate Kildare. Keating dealt in similar fashion with the English knight sent later to replace him as Prior, descending upon him with a force of armed men and destroying his commission of appointment. Excommunication did not prevent this pugnacious son of Erin from clinging on to office until 1494, when Henry VII began a ruthless imposition of royal power in consequence of Lambert Simnel’s rebellion. Keating was replaced with Sir Thomas Docwra and the King ordered the Priory to be confined to Englishmen, chosen from among ‘sad, wise and discreet’ knights, an association of qualities which it was thought would effectively exclude any candidate from the sister island.
Sir John Rawson, the son of a London mercantile family with landed connexions, held the Priory of Ireland from 1511. Commanderies had been so accumulated by that time that there were only four commanders in the whole Priory, two of them chaplains who are thought to have been resident at Kilmainham. That concentration of income enabled Rawson to maintain an establishment second only to the Lord Deputy’s, and he served as Privy Councillor and Treasurer of Ireland. His loyalty was important in preserving royal control in the rebellion of the Earl of Kildare in 1534. The Priory of Kilmainham thus ended as it began, as an instrument of English royal rule in Ireland, but more sadly as a servant of despotism, for there was no such opposition as among the English knights to Henry VIII’s imposition of a state religion. Rawson surrendered Kilmainham in 1540, receiving the Viscountcy of Clontarf and a lavish pension of ?333 a year. One of the turbulent Irish incumbents of the fifteenth century would surely have given the Priory a more honourable end.
World History
