feathers woven with gold which the Pope himself had sent. But John never wore his diadem of peacocks' feathers. Before it had arrived he had been driven from the country. Thus ended the third and last attempt in Henry's reign to conquer Ireland. The strength and the weakness of the king's policy had alike brought misery to the land. The nation was left shattered and bleeding; its native princes weakened in all things save in the habits of treachery and jealousy; its Danish traders driven into exile; its foreign conquerors with their ranks broken, and their hope turned to bitterness. The natural development of the tribal system was violently interrupted by the half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for which the Irish were wholly unprepared. But the feudal conquerors themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred years earlier. Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set nothing in its place. There remained at last only the shattered remnants of two civilizations which by sheer force were maintained side by side. Their fusion was perhaps impossible, but it was certainly rendered less possible by the perplexed and arbitrary interferences of later rulers in England, almost as foreign to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as to the native tribes who, axe in hand and hidden in bog and swamp and forest, clung desperately to the ancient traditions and inheritance of their forefathers. CHAPTER IX REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE