Richard de Clare, Strongbow

Richard de Clare was born around 1130, the son of Gilbert fitz Gilbert de Clare, whom King Stephen created Earl of Pembroke in 1138, and Isabel de Beaumont, a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester ^[1]. The Clares were among the great baronial families of post-Conquest England, descended from Richard fitz Gilbert, a companion of William the Conqueror who had received extensive lands in Kent, Suffolk and Essex after 1066 ^[2].

The nickname Strongbow appears in later medieval sources and was applied both to Richard and to his father, probably reflecting the family's association with the Welsh March, where archery was a distinctive local skill. Contemporary documents call him Richard fitz Gilbert or Earl Richard; the famous byname became fixed in tradition only after his death ^[3].

Richard succeeded to his father's lands and title in 1148, while still a young man. His inheritance centred on Pembroke in southwest Wales and on Strigoil (modern Chepstow), a lordship commanding the lower Wye. Both positions placed him on a turbulent frontier where Norman lords fought, bargained and intermarried with Welsh rulers, an apprenticeship that later shaped his conduct in Ireland ^[1].

Richard's early career was clouded by politics. His family had supported King Stephen during the civil war of 1135 to 1153, and when Stephen's rival's son took the throne as Henry II in 1154, the new king declined to recognise Richard's comital title. For years the man styled Earl of Pembroke by chroniclers appears in royal records without the dignity, a slight that limited his standing and, some historians argue, his prospects at court ^[4].

Opportunity arrived from an unexpected quarter. In 1166 Diarmait Mac Murchada, king of Leinster, was driven from Ireland by a coalition led by the high king Ruaidri Ua Conchobair and Tigernan Ua Ruairc of Breifne. Diarmait crossed to Bristol and then travelled to Aquitaine, where he obtained from Henry II a letter permitting him to recruit soldiers among the king's subjects ^[5].

Diarmait found his principal recruit in Richard de Clare. According to the near-contemporary account of Gerald of Wales, the exiled king promised Richard his daughter Aoife in marriage together with the succession to Leinster, terms that offered a landless-feeling earl the prospect of a kingdom ^[3]. The bargain was extraordinary: Irish kingship did not normally pass through daughters, so the promise depended entirely on force making it good ^[5].

Advance parties preceded the earl. In May 1169 Robert fitz Stephen and Maurice de Prendergast landed at Bannow Bay in what is now County Wexford with a mixed force of knights, archers and men-at-arms, and helped Diarmait retake Wexford town. Raymond le Gros followed in 1170, seizing a fortified position at Baginbun on the Hook peninsula ^[2].

Strongbow himself sailed from Milford Haven and landed near Waterford on 23 August 1170 with a force that Gerald of Wales numbered at about 200 knights and 1,000 other troops. Waterford fell after hard fighting, and there, in the captured city, Richard married Aoife, sealing the compact made with her father ^[3]. The wedding amid the aftermath of the assault later became the subject of Daniel Maclise's celebrated nineteenth-century painting, now in the National Gallery of Ireland ^[6].

The allies then marched north and took Dublin on 21 September 1170, after envoys' negotiations collapsed and Norman knights stormed the walls. The town's Hiberno-Norse ruler, Ascall mac Ragnaill, fled overseas. When Diarmait Mac Murchada died in May 1171, Strongbow claimed Leinster in right of his wife, a claim contested at once by Irish rulers and viewed with alarm by his own king ^[5].

The summer of 1171 tested the claim severely. Ascall returned with a Norse fleet and was defeated and killed; the high king Ruaidri Ua Conchobair then besieged Dublin for weeks with a large coalition army. Facing hunger, the garrison staged a sudden sortie that scattered the besiegers and secured the city, one of the decisive engagements of the whole intervention ^[2].

Success created its own danger. A subject who had conquered a kingdom without royal licence beyond a general letter was a subject who might grow too great, and Henry II moved quickly. The king cut off supplies from his ports and ordered his subjects in Ireland home. Strongbow sent envoys, then travelled to meet Henry, and surrendered Dublin, Waterford, Wexford and the other coastal towns to the crown, receiving back Leinster as a fief held of the king ^[4].

Henry crossed to Ireland in October 1171 with a substantial army, the first reigning king of England to set foot on the island. During his stay, most of the Irish kings and the bishops acknowledged his lordship, and the framework of English royal authority in Ireland was laid down. Strongbow's private conquest had become a royal province ^[5].

The earl proved a loyal, useful servant thereafter. In 1173, when Henry faced a great rebellion by his own sons, Strongbow crossed to Normandy and fought for the king, holding Gisors among other charges. His service was rewarded: Henry confirmed him in Leinster and granted him custody of key strongholds, and in 1173 or 1174 appointed him governor of Ireland ^[1].

Richard's marriage to Aoife Mac Murchada, often anglicised as Eva of Leinster, was the hinge of his career and produced two children who survived him. His son Gilbert died young, unmarried, in the 1180s. His daughter Isabel de Clare became one of the wealthiest heiresses in the Angevin world, and her marriage in 1189 carried Leinster, Pembroke and Strigoil to William Marshal, the celebrated knight who later served as regent of England ^[7].

Before his Irish marriage Richard had at least one other daughter, Aline, who married William fitz Maurice fitz Gerald. Family alliances of this kind knit the leading Cambro-Norman settlers in Ireland into a tight network of kinship that persisted for generations ^[2].

Gerald of Wales left a physical and moral sketch of the earl: tall, fair, freckled, with a voice better suited to counsel than command, generous, more inclined to follow sound advice in the field than to force his own, yet steady in battle once engaged. Gerald wrote to celebrate his own Geraldine relatives, so his measured praise of their commander is generally taken as broadly credible ^[3].

As lord of Leinster, Strongbow set about organising his conquest along familiar feudal lines, granting lands to followers such as Raymond le Gros, Walter de Riddlesford and the Prendergasts in return for knight service, and encouraging the building of castles at strategic points ^[5]. The lordship's administration and its subinfeudation, carried further by his successors, gave eastern Ireland a manorial and urban pattern that endured long after him.

Campaigning continued through the mid 1170s. An expedition against Munster in 1174 ended in a sharp defeat near Thurles at the hands of Domnall Mor Ua Briain and the high king's forces, a reverse that triggered risings across the settled areas and forced Strongbow to recall Raymond le Gros, with whom he had quarrelled, and to give him his sister Basilia in marriage ^[2]. The Treaty of Windsor in 1175 between Henry II and Ruaidri Ua Conchobair then attempted, with limited success, to draw a boundary between the royal and Irish spheres ^[5].

Richard de Clare died in Dublin in April 1176, apparently of an infection in his foot or leg described by chroniclers as an ulcer. He was buried in Christ Church Cathedral, the cathedral of the town he had taken six years earlier. A medieval effigy in the nave, damaged when the roof collapsed in 1562 and partly replaced, has been associated with his tomb for centuries and remains a visitor landmark ^[8].

Few careers in medieval Britain and Ireland had consequences so far out of proportion to their length. Anyone asking who was Richard de Clare, Strongbow, is really asking how English power in Ireland began, since his campaigns of 1170 and 1171 opened a connection between the two islands that lasted, in one constitutional form or another, into the twentieth century ^[5]. Historians are careful to note that he did not act alone: Diarmait's invitation, the earlier landings of fitz Stephen and Prendergast, and Henry II's decisive intervention all shaped the outcome. Yet the earl's marriage, his claim to Leinster and his capture of Dublin were the events that transformed a mercenary expedition into a conquest ^[4].

Any fair account of Richard de Clare, Strongbow achievements must weigh both sides of the ledger. In Irish tradition his name long carried the weight of invasion and dispossession, while in the institutional history of Leinster he figures as the founder of a feudal order, a patron of settlement and the ancestor, through Isabel and William Marshal, of much of the later English and Irish nobility ^[7]. The wedding of Strongbow and Aoife has become one of the most recognised images in Irish history through Maclise's vast canvas of about 1854 ^[6].

The basic Richard de Clare, Strongbow facts rest on unusually good sources for the period: Gerald of Wales's Expugnatio Hibernica, the Norman French verse chronicle known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl, and the Irish annals, which record his death with grim satisfaction ^[3]. Modern scholarship, notably the work of Marie Therese Flanagan, has replaced the older image of a simple adventurer with a portrait of a calculating frontier magnate whose gamble on an exiled Irish king changed two nations. That reassessment keeps a Richard de Clare, Strongbow biography as much a study of opportunity and lordship as of war ^[4].