Henry’s astute policy disarmed, for a time, even Roderick himself. The Anglo-Norman monarch, who would have made an admirable modern politician, does not seem to have desired the absolute ruin of the Irish nation, but his greedy Norman captains were of a different mind, and when Henry, after having wined and dined the Irish princes to their hearts’ content, in Dublin and other cities, at last returned to England, in the fall of 1173, the Norman leaders showed their teeth to the Irish people, and forced most of those who had submitted into fierce revolt. As a result, the Norman forces were crushed in the field. Strongbow, himself, was shut up in Waterford, and his comrades were similarly placed in Dublin, Drogheda, and Wexford. Henry, incensed at this unlooked-for sequel to his Irish pilgrimage, sent over a commission to inquire into the facts. The result was that an Irish delegation went to London to explain, and, at Windsor, where Henry held his court, a treaty was entered into, finally, between King Roderick and himself, by which the former acknowledged Henry as “suzerain,” and Roderick was recognized as High King of Ireland, except the portions thereof held by the Normans under Henry. This was a sad ending of Roderick’s heroic beginning. As usual with English monarchs, when dealing with the Irish people, Henry, urged by his greedy dependants in Ireland, soon found means to grossly violate the Treaty of Windsor, as the compact between the representatives of Roderick and himself was called, thus vitiating it forever and absolving the Irish nation from observing any of its provisions. Another fierce rebellion followed, in which the southern and western Irish—the Anglo-Normans having now grown more numerous and powerful—were remorselessly crushed. Roderick’s rascally son, Prince Murrough O’Conor, who thought his father should be satisfied with the titular High Kingship, and that he himself should be King of Connaught, rose in revolt and attempted to seize the provincial crown. The Connacians, indignant at his baseness, stood by the old king. Murrough was defeated and received condign punishment. This bad prince must have been familiar with the unseemly course pursued by the sons of Henry II in Normandy, for he allied himself with his country’s, and his father’s, enemies, the Anglo-Normans, under the treacherous De Cogan, and this act, more even than his filial impiety, inflamed the minds of his countrymen against the unnatural miscreant. King Roderick, unhappy man, whose pride was mortally wounded, and whose paternal heart, tender and manly, was wrung with sorrow at the crime of his son and its punishment—decreed by the Clans and not by himself—disgusted, besides, with the hopeless condition of Irish affairs, made up his mind to retire from the world, its pomps and vexations. He repaired to the ancient monastery of Cong, in Galway, and there, after twelve years of pious devotion, on the 29th day of November, 1198, in the 82d year of his age,