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High King of Ireland (Irish: Ard Rí na hÉireann) refers to legendary, pagan kings of Tara. It also refers to later kings, who were, depending on the period, either the most powerful king of their day, or, in later times, exercised authority over most of Ireland.
The meaning of High Kingship
While the traditional list of those bearing the title High King of Ireland (Irish: Ard Rí na hÉireann) goes back thousands of years, into the second millennium BC, the earlier parts of the list are largely mythical. It is unclear at what point the list begins to refer to historical individuals, and also at what point these individuals can genuinely be said to be "High Kings" in the later sense of the word.
Most scholars believe that the idea of the High Kingship was a pseudohistorical construct of the eighth century that placed a king of all Ireland atop the fragmented pyramid of kingship which actually existed at that time. This notion of a high kingship acted as a spur to greater centralisation and was converted into political reality by the middle of the ninth century. Until quite recently the development of the pre-Norman kingship of Ireland has been expressed in simplistic terms, with both unionist and nationalist historians happy to portray pre-Norman Ireland as an immutable hierarchy of kings for their own purposes. In unionist historiography the picture painted has been one of tribal anarchy, while that of nationalist historiography has been a Utopian harmony. Modern-day historians reject both of these portrayals as simplistic, presenting a history of Irish kingship that is more complex and parallels the development of national kingship elsewhere in Europe.
Sacral High Kings
Early Irish kingship was sacral in character. In the early narrative literature a king is a king because he marries the sovereignty goddess, is free from blemish, enforces symbolic buada (prerogatives) and avoids symbolic gessa (taboos). According to the seventh and eighth century law tracts a hierarchy of kingship and clientship progressed from the rí (king of a single petty kingdom) through the ruiri (a rí who was overking of several petty kingdoms) to a rí ruirech (a rí who was a provincial overking). Each king ruled directly only within the bounds of his own petty kingdom and was responsible for ensuring good government by exercising fír flaithemon (rulers truth), convening its óenach (popular assembly), raising taxes, public works, external relations, defence, emergency legislation, law enforcement and promulgating legal judgement. The lands within the petty kingdom were held allodially by various fine (agnatic kingroups) of freemen with the king occupying the apex of a pyramid of clientship within the petty kingdom (progressing from the unfree population at its base up to the heads of noble fine held in immediate clientship by the king) and so being drawn from the dominant fine within the cenél (a wider kingroup encompassing the noble fine of the petty kingdom).
The kings of the Ulster Cycle are kings in this sacred sense, but it is clear that the old concept of kingship coexisted alongside Christianity for several generations. Diarmaid mac Cearbhaill king of Tara in the middle of the 6th century, may have been the last king to have "married" the land, and indeed there are accounts from the century after Diarmait's death at the hands of Áed Dub mac Suibni which have him killed by the Three-Fold Death - by wounding, by falling from a tree, and by drowning - and indeed Adomnán's Life tells how Saint Columba forecast the same death for Áed Dub. The same Three-Fold Death is said to have put an end of Diarmait's predecessor, Muirchertach macc Ercae, in a late poem, and even the usually reliably Annals of Ulster record Muirchertach's death by drowning in a vat of wine.
A second sign that sacral kingship did not disappear with the arrival of Christianity is the supposed law-suit between Congal Cáech, king of the Ulaid and Domnall mac Áedo. Congal was supposedly blinded in one eye by Domnall's bees, from whence his byname Cáech (half-blind of squinting), this injury rendering him imperfact and unable to remain High King. The enmity between Domnall and Congal can more prosaically be laid at the door of the rivalry between the Uí Néill and the kings of Ulaid, but that a king had to be whole in body appears to have been accepted at this time.
Succession order and claimants
The business of Irish pretenders is rather complicated because of the nature of kingship in Ireland before the Norman take-over of 1171. In Ireland, succession to kingship was elective, often (if not usually) by contest. That is, the head of state of any kingdom, sub-kingdom, high kingdom, etc., was always a king, but the king always inherited the crown through sort of tanistry.
In Ireland, however, the high king from the time of Maelsheachlainn I (died 862) exercised a measure of control over the country. He belonged to the Ui Neill dynasty and under the Brehon laws, succession was open to any kinsman up to and including second cousin. His dynasty is today represented by the O'Neill family who would regard their head as the pretender. The O Conor dynasty provided two high kings and the head of the family, the O Conor Don, would also be considered a pretender to the Irish throne. The descendants of Brian Boroimhe are represented by Lord Inchiquin, who is also regarded as a claimant. In addition, pretenders or claimants exist to the localised kingdoms of Breifne, Fermanagh, Tyrconnel and Leinster. The O'Neills would also be regarded as claimants to the throne of Aileach and Lord Inchiquin to the throne of Thomond.
A transition to primogeniture never happened in pre-English Ireland, but civil war and the imposition of Anglo-Norman rule intervened. Although Ireland had been culturally unified for centuries, it was not politically unified, even as a tribal nation. The Romans having ignored the big green island west of Britain, the Gaels themselves were the last people to successfully invade Ireland and, notwithstanding 750 years of English rule, it is very arguable whether the Norman English ever truly conquered Ireland. (They controlled Ireland, certainly, but that is not all there is to conquest.) So, even serious coastal encroachments by the Vikings a millennium after their arrival did not prompt the Gaels of Ireland to see a need for political unity even to build a concerted national defence. When a people believe they and their country are immune from invasion, it takes a while for them to realise how vulnerable they actually are.
The High King of Ireland was essentially a ceremonial, pseudo-federal overlord (where his over-lordship was even recognised), who exercised actual power only within the realm of which he was actually king. In the case of the southern branch of the Uí Niall, this would have been the Kingdom of Meath (modernly the counties of Meath, West Meath and part of County Dublin). High Kings from the northern branch of the family ruled various kingdoms in what eventually became the province of Ulster.
Nevertheless, the Uí Niall were apparently powerful in ceremony if not in politic, so that political unification of Ireland was not aided by the usurpation of the high kingship from Mael Sechnaill II and the southern Uí Niall in 1002 by Briain ‘Boruma’ mac Cennédig, of the Kingdom of Munster. This was the third of the so-called "Three Usurpations of Brian Boru."
Brian Boru was a strong king who could have unified Ireland politically, and there is some suggestion he intended to make himself High King of Scotland as well. But he was killed in the Battle of Contarf in 1014, and twelve years as High King was not long enough to unify the island politically. Mael Sechnaill II was restored to the High Kingship but he died in 1022, too soon to undo the damage done by Brian's "coup." From 1022 through the Norman take-over of 1171, the High Kingship was held by "Kings with Opposition" - that is, whoever was strong enough to overthrow the High King of the day and take the Hill of Tara simply did so. This 150-year period of regnal unrest between families now called O'Brian, O'Conner, McLoughlin/O'Melaghlin, and others, was eventually immortalised in the children's game called "King of the Hill." The game is still popular among American children, who take turns trying to push each other off a low stool, chair, or other make-shift hill while arguing, "I'm king of the hill!" "No! I'm king!" or "I'm the king of the castle, and you're a dirty rascal!"
Because the native Irish high kingship never transitioned to a system of nation-state kingship primogeniture but simply faded into an oblivion of civil war between competing Irish royal families, there are literally as many as a million or more people who can make a claim to the ancient high kingship of Tara that is as equally valid as anybody else's under the old system disrupted by what may be called Brian Boru's "coup de tribe." Indeed, as a reputed descendant of Brian Boru and of the Uí Niall Dynasty both through his late grandmother, the current heir to the statutory throne that includes Northern Ireland, Prince Charles, could be considered a viable pretender to the high kingship of Ireland, especially as he would be making the claim through the female line of his ancestry. {The British Royal Family has publicly claimed descent from Brian Boru through the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and from other ancestors associated with the Ui Niall Dynasty - usually via marriage through the Royal Family's Scottish ancestry; see the history section of the Royal Family's website for bloodlines and timelines.) But see the remarks above regarding existing native dynasties, whose claims are more valid than those of the current British royal family.
Early Christian High Kings
Even at the time the law tracts were being written these petty kingdoms were being swept away by newly emerging dynasties of dynamic overkings. The most successful of these early dynasties were the Uí Néill (encompassing descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages such as the Cenel Eoghain) who as kings of Tara had been conquering petty kingdoms, expelling their rulers and agglomerating their territories under the direct rule of their expanding kindred since the fifth century. Native and foreign, pagan and Christian ideas were comingled to form a new idea of Irish kingship. The native idea of a sacred kingship was integrated with the Christian idea in the ceremony of coronation, the relationship of king to overking became one of tigerna (lord) to king and imperium (sovereignty) began to merge with dominium (ownership). The church was well disposed to the idea of a strong political authority. Its clerics developed the theory of a high kingship of Ireland and wrote tracts exhorting kings to rule rather than reign. In return the paruchiae (monastic federations) of the Irish church received royal patronage in the form of shrines, building works, land and protection.
The concept of a high kingship was converted into political reality by the Uí Néill in 862 when Aed Finliath is styled in the annals as rí Érenn uile (king of all Ireland), but this was a personal kingship to be won anew generation by generation rather than an impersonal office settled upon a lineage.
Later High Kings
By the twelfth century the dual process of agglomeration of territory and consolidation of kingship saw the handful of remaining provincial kings abandoning the traditional royal sites for the cities, employing ministers and governors, receiving advice from an oireacht (a body of noble counsellors), presiding at reforming synods and maintaining standing armies. Early royal succession had been by alternation between collateral branches of the wider dynasty but succession was now confined to a series of father/son, brother/brother and uncle/nephew successions within a small royal fine marked by an exclusive surname. These compact families (O Brien of Munster, MacLochlainn of the North, O Connor of Connacht) intermarried and competed against each other on a national basis so that on the eve of the Anglo-Norman incursion of 1169 we find the agglomeration/consolidation process complete and their provincial kingdoms divided, dismembered and transformed into fiefdoms held from (or in rebellion against) one of their number acting as king of Ireland.
British Kings of Ireland
From 1171 to 1541 the King of England and Wales was also Lord of Ireland. King Henry VIII made himself and his successors King of Ireland in 1541, and Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
During the 1916 Easter Rising many rebel leaders considered making Prince Joachim of Prussia the King of a new Irish state, but the Rising was defeated and Prince Joachim committed suicide in 1920. The head of state of the Irish Republic (1919-1922) was the President of Dáil Éireann. The King of Great Britain remained monarch of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1937, when the Free State became Éire, with the President of Ireland as Head of State. George VI was thus the last King to rule over all Ireland. At present, Queen Elizabeth II is monarch of Northern Ireland, while Her Excellency Mary McAleese is President of the Republic.
See also
External link
- Nationality and Kingship in Pre-Norman Ireland by Prof. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, University College Cork
Ancient Ireland | Irish mythology | Cycles of the Kings | High Kings of Ireland
"High King of Ireland"