ABSTRACT
John, Lord of Ireland and count of Mortain, succeeded his knight-errant brother and was crowned King of England on June 2nd 1199. 1 Richard I left no issue and so, by another unlooked-for event, the whole future of Ireland was decided. Had Cceur-de-Lion left a son, John might have founded a separate Angevin dynasty in Ireland. But ‘the emerald gem of the western world’, which might have been the main glory of a native king, was ‘set in the crown of a stranger’, and became only one of the many gems that glittered in the Plantagenet diadem. The lordship of Ireland, in short, was annexed for a long future to the kingdom of England.
