Présentation de l'éditeur
Ireland's struggle for freedom reaches back much further into the annals of history than most of us can imagine. Since the eleventh century, when legendary King Brian Boru united the chieftains of Ireland to resist Viking invasion, countless individual leaders have fought to preserve and protect Ireland's political and cultural autonomy. In a chronicle of unprecedented breadth and authority, FOR THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY tells the stories of these heroes, including both men and women, Catholics and Protestants, who enabled the Irish to free themselves from the yoke of colonial oppression.
Journalist Terry Golway reconstructs the entire thousand year history of Irish nationalism, covering each benchmark event in Ireland's political evolution and presenting a vivid, epic tale of both the famous and unsung patriots who changed the course of Ireland's history. Among these are Wolfe Tone, a leader of the 1798 rebellion who cut his own throat rather than submit to a hangman; Kevin Barry, executed at age eighteen rather than turn informer on the eve of independence in 1921; and Bobby Sands, an IRA militant who died on a hunger strike in 1981, calling international attention to the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Extrait
Chapter One: Conquest
The first King of England to dispatch troops to Ireland did so with the blessing of the Pope. The King was Henry II; the Pope was Adrian IV -- the only Englishman to sit on the throne of Saint Peter.
Adrian gave his assent in 1155, long before the Reformation, long before religious differences were introduced to Ireland as a means of distinguishing friend from foe. Henry II and Adrian considered themselves modernizers, and Ireland, they decided, required modernizing. The native people who populated the island, the Gaels, were descendants of Celtic tribes who had conquered Ireland and the rest of Europe centuries before the birth of Christ. The Romans never made it to Ireland, and so the Gaelic Irish developed a flourishing civilization and language that bore few traces of Roman influence. But the Irish had enthusiastically embraced the Church of Rome. Patrick, a native of Britain who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland, converted the island to Christianity without a struggle in the fifth century.
Detached not only from the Continent but from the neighboring island to the east, the Gaels were different, different in their practice of Christianity, different in their law and customs. Religious irregularities such as divorce and the active leadership of women in religious life were permitted in Gaelic Christianity, while little heed was paid to the Papacy. Ireland had a vibrant, distinctive literature, filled with heroic tales of pagan warriors, when the rest of Europe was thrashing through the dark ages. The most famous of these legendary warriors was Cuchulain, a great champion who was slain in defense of his homeland.
In its political life, Ireland, unlike England, had yet to develop a strong, centralized monarchy, although there was no shortage of kings. Indeed, there were dozens, scores, of them scattered throughout the island, ruling over communities called
rí túathe. While there was a High King, or
ard rí, he did not rule as Henry ruled in England. The High King's position was mostly ceremonial, although one of them, Brian Boru, gained fame when he united the island's disparate communities and then defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.
The island's customs certainly puzzled its powerful English neighbors, who saw in such cultural difference evidence of ignorance and barbarism. Gaelic Ireland was rural and socially mobile. Land was not enclosed, and property rights were unclear. The family, not the individual, was the basic unit of Gaelic society. When a king died, all male descendants were eligible to succeed him. The eventual successor was chosen in an election and given a Gaelic title -- for example, the head of one of I
