Diarmait Mac Murchada

Diarmait Mac Murchada
King of Leinster in Ireland
Reign	1126–1171
Predecessor	Enna mac Donnchada Mac Murchada
Successor	Domnall Caemánach Mac Murchada
Spouse	(1) Sadb ingen Faeláin (2) Mór Uí Tuathail
Father	Donnchad mac Murchada
Mother	unknown
Born	c.1110 Leinster in Ireland
Died	1 May 1171
Burial	Ferns, County Wexford

Diarmait Mac Murchada (Modern Irish: Diarmait mac Murchadha or Diarmaid mac Murchadha), anglicized as Dermot MacMurrough or Dermod MacMurrough (1110–1 May 1171), was a King of Leinster in Ireland. In 1167, he was deprived of his kingdom by the High King of Ireland - Turlough Mór O'Connor (Irish: Tairrdelbach mac Ruaidri Ua Conchobair). The grounds for the dispossession were that MacMurrough had, in 1152, abducted Derbforgaill, the wife of the King of Breifne, Tiernan O'Rourke (Irish: Tighearnán Ua Ruairc). To recover his kingdom, MacMurrough solicited help from King Henry II of England. In return, MacMurrough pledged an oath of allegiance to Henry, who sent troops in support. As a further thanks for his reinstatement, MacMurrough's daughter Aoife was married to Richard de Clare, the 2nd Earl of Pembroke (nicknamed "Strongbow"). Henry II then mounted a larger second invasion in 1171 to ensure his control over Strongbow, resulting in the Lordship of Ireland. MacMurrough was later known as Diarmait na nGall (Irish for "Diarmait of the Foreigners").

Early life and family

MacMurrough was born around 1110, a son of Donnchad mac Murchada, King of Leinster and Dublin. His father's grandmother Dervorgilla (Derbforgaill) was a daughter of Donnchad, King of Munster and therefore she was a grand-daughter of Brian Boru.^[1] His father was killed in battle in 1115 by the Dublin Vikings, and was buried by them in Dublin along with the body of a dog, considered to be a huge insult.

MacMurrough had two wives (as allowed under the Brehon Laws), the first of whom, Sadb of Uí Faeláin, was mother of a daughter named Órlaith who married Domnall Mór, King of Munster. His second wife, Mór Uí Tuathail, was mother of Aoife / Eva of Leinster and Conchobar Mac Murchada. He had two legitimate sons, Domnall Caemhánach (died 1175) and Énna Cennselach (blinded 1169).

King of Leinster

After the death of his older brother, Enna mac Donnchada Mac Murchada, Dermot unexpectedly became King of Leinster. This was opposed by the then High King of Ireland, Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair who feared (rightly) that Mac Murchada would become a rival. Toirdelbach sent one of his allied Kings, the belligerent Tigernán Ua Ruairc (Tiernan O'Rourke) to conquer Leinster and oust the young Mac Murchada. Ua Ruairc went on a brutal campaign slaughtering the livestock of Leinster and thereby trying to starve the province's residents. Mac Murchada was ousted from his throne, but was able to regain it with the help of Leinster clans in 1132. Afterwards followed two decades of an uneasy peace between Ua Conchobair and Diarmait. In 1152 he even assisted the High King to raid the land of Ua Ruairc who had by then become a renegade.

Mac Murchada also is said to have "abducted" Ua Ruairc's wife Derbforgaill (English: Dervorgilla) along with all her furniture and goods, with the aid of Derbforgaill's brother, a future pretender to the kingship of Meath. It was said that Derbforgaill was not exactly an unwilling prisoner and she remained in Ferns with MacMurrough, in comfort, for a number of years. Her advanced age indicates that she may have been a refugee or a hostage. Whatever the reality, the "abduction" was given as a further reason for enmity between the two kings.

Church builder

As king of Leinster, in 1140-70 Dermot commissioned Irish Romanesque churches and abbeys at:

• Baltinglass - a Cistercian abbey (1148)
• Glendalough
• Ferns (his capital - St Mary's Abbey Augustinian Order)
• Killeshin

He sponsored convents (nunneries) at Dublin (St Mary's, 1146), and in c.1151 two more at Aghade, County Carlow and at Kilculliheen near Waterford city.

He also sponsored the successful career of churchman St Lawrence O'Toole (Lorcan Ua Tuathail). He married O'Toole's half-sister Mor in 1153 and presided at the synod of Clane in 1161 when O'Toole was installed as archbishop of Dublin.^[2]

Exile and return

Dermot MacMurrough.

In 1166, Ireland's new High King and Mac Murchada's only ally Muirchertach Ua Lochlainn had fallen, and a large coalition led by Tigernán Ua Ruairc (Mac Murchada's arch enemy) marched on Leinster. Ua Ruairc and his allies took Leinster with ease, and Mac Murchada and his wife barely escaped with their lives. Mac Murchada fled to Wales and from there to England and France, in order to have King Henry II's consent to be allowed to recruit soldiers to bring back to Ireland and reclaim his kingship. On returning to Wales, Robert Fitz-Stephen helped him organize a mercenary army of Norman and Welsh soldiers, including Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, alias Strongbow.

In his absence Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (son of Mac Murchada's former enemy, the High King Turlough Mór O'Connor) had become the new High King of Ireland. Mac Murchada planned not only to retake Leinster, but to oust the Uí Conchobair clan and become the High King of Ireland himself. In 1167 he quickly retook Dublin, the Kingdom of Ossory and the Norse-Gaelic settlement of Waterford. Within a short time, all Leinster was again in his control. He then marched on Tara (the political capital at the time) to oust Ruaidrí. Mac Murchada gambled that Ruaidrí would not hurt the Leinster hostages which he had (including Mac Murchada's eldest son, Conchobar Mac Murchada). However Ua Ruairc forced his hand and they were all killed.

Diarmait's army then lost the battle. He sent word to Wales and pleaded with Strongbow to come to Ireland as soon as possible. Strongbow's small force landed in Wexford with Welsh and Norman cavalry thereby precipitating the Norman invasion of Ireland. The Cambro-Norman barons and knights quickly took over both Waterford and Wexford. The capture of Dublin followed soon after. MacMurrough was devastated after the death of his son, Domhnall, retreated to Ferns and died a few months later.

The Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow (1854) by Daniel Maclise, a romanticised depiction of the union between Aoife and Richard de Clare in the ruins of Waterford.

Strongbow married Dermot's daughter Aoife of Leinster in 1170, as she was a great heiress, and as a result much of his (and his followers') land was granted to him under Norman law but contrary to Brehon law. The marriage was imagined and painted in the Romantic style in 1854 by Daniel Maclise.

The scholar Áed Ua Crimthainn was probably Diarmait's court historian. In his Book of Leinster, Áed seems to be the first to set out the concept of the rí Érenn co fressabra, the "king of Ireland with opposition", later more widely adopted. This described Diarmait's ambitions and the achievements of his great-grandfather Diarmait mac Maíl na mBó.^[3]

Later reputation

In Irish history books written after 1800 in the age of nationalism, Diarmait Mac Murchada was often seen as a traitor, but his intention was not to aid an English invasion of Ireland, but rather to use Henry's assistance to become the High King of Ireland himself. He had no way of knowing Henry II's ambitions in Ireland. In his time, politics was based on dynasties and Ireland was not ruled as a unitary state. In turn, Henry II did not consider himself to be English or Norman, but a French Angevin, and was merely responding to the realities on the ground.^[4]

Gerald of Wales, a Cambro-Norman historian who visited Ireland in 1185 and whose uncles and cousins were prominent soldiers in the army of Strongbow, repeated their opinions of Mac Murchada:

"Now Dermot was a man tall of stature and stout of frame; a soldier whose heart was in the fray, and held valiant among his own nation. From often shouting his battle-cry his voice had become hoarse. A man who liked better to be feared by all than loved by any. One who would oppress his greater vassals, while he raised to high station men of lowly birth. A tyrant to his own subjects, he was hated by strangers; his hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him."

Death and descendants

After Strongbow's successful invasion, Henry II mounted a second and larger invasion in 1171 to ensure his control over his Norman subjects, which succeeded. He then accepted the submission of the Irish kings in Dublin in November 1171. He also ensured that his moral claim to Ireland, granted by the 1154 papal bull Laudabiliter, was reconfirmed in 1172 by Pope Alexander III, and also by a synod of all the Irish bishops at the Synod of Cashel. He added "Lord of Ireland" to his many other titles. Before he could consolidate his new Lordship he had to go to France to deal with his sons' rebellion in 1173.

Ua Conchobair was soon ousted, first as High King and eventually as King of Connacht. Attempting to regain his provincial kingdom, he turned to the English as Mac Murchada had before him. The Lordship directly controlled a small territory in Ireland surrounding the cities of Dublin and Waterford, while the rest of Ireland was divided between Norman and Welsh barons. The 1175 Treaty of Windsor, brokered by St Lawrence O'Toole with Henry II, formalized the submission of the Gaelic clans that remained in local control, like the Uí Conchobair who retained Connacht and the Uí Néill who retained most of Ulster.

Diarmait's male-line descendants such as Art Mac Art continued to rule parts of Leinster until the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the 16th century. Today they live on with the surname "MacMurrough Kavanagh" at Borris in Co. Carlow and at Maresfield, East Sussex, being one of the few surviving "Chiefs of the name".^[5] The currently recognized chief of the name is William Butler Kavanagh, The MacMorrough Kavanagh, Prince of Leinster (b. 1944) [1].

Through his daughter Aoife, Diarmait is also an ancestor of a great number of historically-famous people, including George Washington, Marie-Antoinette, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet, Charles Darwin and Winston Churchill.^[6][7]

More notably he is the ancestor (through Aoife's granddaughter Eva Marshal and her daughter Maud who married Roger Mortimer) of the kings of England Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, and all kings from Henry VIII onwards. There are other notable descents from Aoife's daughter Isabel de Clare such as that of Katherine Mortimer, Aoife's great-granddaughter, who married Thomas de Beauchamp 11th Earl of Warwick, and was therefore an ancestor of the Earls of Warwick and Kings of England from Edward IV onwards (with the exception of Henry VII).

See also

• Kings of Leinster
• Irish nobility
• Irish royal families

References

1. ^ John O'Hart, Irish Pedigrees (Dublin, 1892) Vol. I, pages 157, 555.
2. ^ Tahdg O'Keefe essay in JRSAI vol.127 pp.52-79 (1997).
3. ^ Byrne, Francis John (2005), "Ireland and her neighbours, c.1014–c.1072", in Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí, Prehistoric and Early Ireland, A New History of Ireland, I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 862–898, ISBN 0-19-922665-8  at pp. 869–870.
4. ^ In chapter 19 of Alexander Martin Sullivan's "Story of Ireland" (1867) Henry is described as a "wily Englishman".
5. ^ Notes on the armless and legless Arthur (1831-89)
6. ^ Humphrys web page accessed 14-1-2009
7. ^ Diarmait's family tree online

Sources

• Annals of the Four Masters, ed. J. O'Donovan; 1990 edition.
• Expugnatio Hibernica, by Giraldus Cambrensis; ed., with transln and historical notes, by A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978
• Byrne, Francis J. (1973) Irish Kings and High Kings. London: Batsford (Rev. ed. Dublin: Four Courts, 1999)
• Roche, Richard (1995) The Norman Invasion of Ireland. Dublin: Anvil Books (1st ed. [Tralee]: Anvil Books, c1970)
• O'Byrne, Emmett (2003) War, Politics and the Irish of Leinster 1156-160. Dublin: Four Courts
• Furlong, Nicholas (1973) Dermot, King of Leinster, and the foreigners. Tralee: Anvil Books ISBN 0-900068-37-X
• --do.-- Dermait, King of Leinster. Cork: Mercier Press, 2006 ISBN 1-85635-505-5
• Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America Before 1700; by Frederick Lewis Weis, Lines: 66-26, 175-6

Theater

• The Dreaming of the Bones by William Butler Yeats. The ghosts of Dermot and Derbforgaill rescue an Irish freedom fighter during the Easter Week rebellion. They reveal that they are bound until someone of the Irish race can forgive them for bringing the English to Ireland.

Film

• 'Diarmait & Strongbow' akajava films (2005) TV documentary for TG4 (Irl)

Source for genealogy

• Byrne, Francis J. (1973) Irish Kings and High-Kings. London: Batsford (Rev. ed. Dublin: Four Courts, 1999) "Uí Cheinnselaig Kings of Laigin", p. 290
• O'Byrne, Emmett (2003) War, Politics and the Irish of Leinster Dublin: Four Courts; "The MacMurrough-Kavanagh kings of Leinster; Outline Genealogies I, Ia, Ib", pages 247-249.
• O'Hart, John (1892) Irish Pedigrees; 5th ed. 2 vols. Dublin: James Duffy, pp. 157, 555. (1st ed.: 1878; several later eds.)

Persondata
Name	Diarmait Mac Murchada
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1110
Place of birth	Leinster in Ireland
Date of death	1 May 1171
Place of death