THE BULL OF POPE ADRIAN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 26, 17 October 1884, Page 21

THE BULL OF POPE ADRIAN.

(Concluded.)

V- — In the Remonstrance addressed by the Irish princes and people to John XXII., about the year 1313, repeated mention is made of the Bull of Adrian. But then it is oaly cited there as a conclusive argument ail ltomhiem. against the English traducers of our nation : "Lest the hitter and veuemous calumnie3 of the English, and their unjust and unfounded attacks upon us and all who support our rights, may in any degree influenc? the mind of your Holiness." The Bull of Adrian IV. was published by the English, and set forth by them as the charter-deed of their rule in Ireland, yet they violated in a mo3t flagrant m inner all the conditious of that Papal grant. The Irish princes and pc >ple in self-defence had now ma le over the sovereignty of the island to Edward de Bruce, brother of the Scottish King; they style him their adopted monarch, and they pray the Pope to give a formal sanction to their pr iceedings. Thus throughout tae whole Remonstrance the Bull of Adrian is used as a telling argument against the injustice of the invaders, and as a precedent which John XXII might justly follow in sanctioning the transfer of the Irish Crown to Edward Bruce. But in all this the historian will find no grounds for asserting the genuineness of the supposed Bulls of Adrian aud Alexander. We will just now see that at this very time the Irish people universally regard these Bulls as spurious inventions of their English enemies. ° VI. — Baronius, the eminent ecclesiastical historian, inserts in his invaluable Annals the Bull of Adrian IV " from a Vatican Manuscript. " This is the sixth argument advanced by Mr, O'Callaghan. It is not my intention to question in any way the services rendered by Cardinal Baronius to the cause of our Church History ; but at the same time no one will deny that considerable progress has been made in historical research during the past three hundred and fifty years, and many documents are now set aside which were then accepted as unquestioned on the supposed relitble authority of preceding chroniclers.

In the present instance we are not left in doubt a 9 to the source whence Baronius derived his information regarding Adrian's supposed Bull. During my stay in Rome I took occasion to inquire whether the MSS. of the eminent annalist, which are happily preserved, indicated the special " Vatican Maauscript " referred to in his printed text, and I wa9 informed by the learned archivist of the Vatican, Monsignor Tbeiner, who is at present engaged iv giving a new edition, and continuing the great work of Barouius, that the Codex Vaticanus referred to is a MS. c}py of the History of Matthew Paris, which is preserved in the Vatican Library, Thus it is the testimony of Matthew Paris alone that here confronts us in the pages of Baronius, and no new argument can he taken from the words of the eminent auna ist. llelying on the same high autboiity, lam happy to state tbatn where in the private archives or amoDg the private papers of the Vaticau or among the Rcsgesta, which JaftVs researches have made so famous, or iv the various indices of the Pontifical Letters, can a si-igle trace be found of the supposed Bulls of Adrian IV. and Alexander 111.

Vll.— The last argument advanced by Mr. O'Calaghan will not. detain us long. The insertion or omission of such ancieut reorda in* the Bullariuni is a matter that depends wholly on the critical skill of the editor. Curious enough, in one edition ot the Btdlarhim as may be seen in the references of Dr. Lanigan, Adrian's Bull is inserted, whilbt no mentiou is made of that of Alexander ; in auother edition, howe\ er, tbe Bull of Alexander is given in full, whilsc the Bull of Adrian is omitied. We may well leave our opponents to settle this matter with the conflicting editors of the Bullariuni. They, prob.ibly like Baioniue, merely copied the Bull of Adrian from Matthew Paris, and erred in doing so. Labbe.in his magnifijent edition of the Councils, also publishes Adri&n's Bull ; but then he expressly tells us that it is copied fiorn the works of Matthew fari->.

We h.ive thus, as far as the limits of this aniole will allow, oxamiiifd in detail the var ous arguments which support the genuineness of the supposed Bull, a id now it only remains for us to conclude that there are no sufficient grounds for acjepting that documcut as the genuine work of Pope Adrian. Indeed the Iri^h nation at all t mes, as if in&tinctively, shrunk from accepting it as genuine, and unhesitatingly proaouueed it an Anglo- Norman forgeiy. We have already t-een how even GriM.l-.lm o'aaibn.nsis refers to tue doubts whica had arisen rogardiug tne Ball cf fope Alexander ; but we have at hml still more conclusive evideuco that Adriau's Bull was universally rejected by our people. There is. happily, preserved iv the Barbermi archives, in home, a MS. of the fourteenth century containing a te.ies of official papers conneced with the Pontificate of John XXtL, and amongsc them is a letter from the Lord Justiciary and the ii y il Council of Ireland forwaided to Rome under the Royal Seal, and presented to His Holiness by William of Nottingham, Canon and Precentor of S h . Patrick's Cahedral, Dubliu, about the year 1325. In this important, but hitheito unnoticed, document the Irish arj acjused of very many crimes, among wuich is insidiously iutroiluced the rejection of the supposed Bull : •' Moreover, they assert that the King of ifinglaud under talsj pretences and by f tUe Bulls obt lined the dominion of Ireland, and this opinion is commonly held by iheru," — " Asserentes etiam Domimim Regan Angliae ex falsa suggestions et ex fahis Btdlte terrain Hibrrniae in dominiwn i uipctrasse ao commiiniter hoc tenentes." This national tradition was preserved unbroken throughout the turmoil of the fif eenth and sixteenth centuries ; and on the revival of our historical literature, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was registered in the pages of Lynch, Stephen White, aiid other writtrs.

It will be well also, whilst forming our judgment regarding this supposed Bull of Adrian, to hold in mind thd disturbed state of society, especially in Italy, at the time to which it refers. At the present day it would be no easy matter indeed for such a forgery to survive moie than a few weeks. But at the close of the Twelfth Century it was far otherwise. O»ving to the constant revolutions and disturb ces that then prevailed, the Pontiff was oftentimes

obliged to fly from city to city : frequently his papers were seized and burned, and he himself detained as a hostage or a piisoner by his enemies. Hence it is that several forged Bulls, examples of which are given in Cambremis Bversus, date from these times. More than one of the grants made to the Norman families are now believed to rest on such forgeries ; and that the Anglo-Norman adventurers ia Ireland were not strangers to such deeds of darkness, appears from the fact that a matrix for forging the Papal Seal oE such Bulls, now preserved in the R. I. Academy, was found a few years ago i i the rains of oue of the earliest Anglj-Norman monasteries found id by De Courcy. The circumstances of the publication of the Bull by Honry were surely not calculated to disarm suspicion. *Our opponents do not even preteni that it was made known in Ireland till the year 1175. and hence, though publicly gr mted with solemn investiture, as John of Salisbury's testimony would imply, and taough it 3 reoord was deposited in the public archives of the kingdom, this Bali, so vital to the interests of the Iri3U Church, should h*ve remu.'iet dormant for twenty yeats, unnoticed in Rome, unnotice i by H-snry's courtiers, still more, unnoticed by the Irish Bishops, and, I will add, unnoticed by the Continental Sovereigns so je»lous of tho power and preponderance of the English monarch. For such suppositions there is no parallel in the whole history of investitures. It is seldom, too, that the hand of the impostor may not be detected in some at least of the minor details of the spurious document. In the present instance more than ene ancient MS. preserves the concluding formula of the Ball, Datum Romae, " Dated from Rome. Now, this simple formula would suffice of itself to prove the whole Bull to be a forgery. Before the news of the el .-ctiou of Pope Adrian to the Chair of St. Peter could reach England, that Pontiff was obliged to seek for safety in flight from his capital. Rome was in revolt, and Arnold of Brescia sought to renew there a spectre of the old Pagan Republic. John of Salisbury, in his Polycratieitg, faithfully attests that on his arrival in Italy the Papal Court was held not in Rome but in BeneTentum ; it was in this city he presented to Pope Adrian the congratulations of ;Heary 11., and he mentions his sojourn there during the three months that he remained in Italy. This is further confirmed by the Italian chronicles. Baronius saw the inconsistency of the formula, Datum Romae, with the date 1155, and hence, in his Annals he entered Adrian's Bull under the year 1159 ; but if this date be correct, surely then that Bull could not have been brought to Henry by John of Salisbury, and the passage of the Metalogious referring to it must at once be admitted a forgery. Other historians have been equally puzzled to find a year for this supposed Bull. For instance, O'Halloi an, in his History of Ireland, whilst admitting that the Irish people always regarded the Bull a 9 a forgery, refers its date to the year 1167, that is, eight years after the death of Pope Adi ian IV. There is only one other reflection with wliich I wish to detain the reader. The condition of our country and the relations between Ireland and the English King, which are set forth in the supposed Bull, are precisely those of the year 1172 ; but it would have required more than prophetic vision io have anticipated them in 1155. In 1155 Ireland was not in a state of turmoil, or verging towards barbarism : on the contrary it was rapidly progiessing and reuewing its claim to reiigious and m>ral pre-eminence. I will aid that Pope Adrian, who had studied nnder Irish masters, knew well this fijurisning condition of our country. In 1172, however, a sad change had come over our island. Four years of continual warfare, and the ravages of the Anglo-Norman filibusterers, since their first landing ia 1168, had well-nigh reduced Ireland to a state of barbarism ; and tho autheutic letters of Alexander 111., in 1172, faithfully describe its most deplorable condition. Moreover, an expedition of Henry to Ireland, which would not be an invasion, and yet would merit tho homage ©f the Irish princes, was simply an impossibility in 1155. But owing to the special circumstances of the kingdom, such in reality was the expedition of Henry in 1172. He set out for Ireland not avowe ily to invade an 1 conquer it, but to curb the insolence aud to punish the deeds of pillage of his own Norman freebooters. Hence, during his stay in Ireland he fought no battle ani made uo conquest ; his first measures of severity were directed ag»inst some of the mo t lawless of the early Norman adventurers, and tbis more than auything elso reconciled the native princes to his military display. Ia return he received from the majority of the Irish chieftains the empty title of Ard-righ, or " Head Sovereign," which did not suppose any conquest on his part, and did not invol ve any surreuder of their own hereditary right 9. Such a state of thingj could nut have been imagined in 1155 ; and yet it is one which is implied in the spurious Bull of the much maligned Pontiff, Adrian the Fourth.