prussiablue: Well we started (almost) on a regency, so why not end on one?
J. Passepartout: Heh, well indeed.
coz1: Yeah, and I fully intend to transfer this to EUII at some point (Another good reason to end in 1419/20)!
Draco Rexus: I think it seems very fitting that a story that began with a premature case of old age should end with a boy king. Don't you?
Well I'd like to thank all you guys for supporting and reading this AAR, which I admit has proven harder to write than I expected, but all the more enjoyable for it.
Rest assured that I intend to start another AAR very shortly (feel free to provide suggestions!). It's been a real pleasure guys.
Part 50: The End
Above: The FitzGerald family crest
So once again the FitzGerald family found itself under a regency. This time however instead of placing a single regent or a feuding handful of elites the regency was firmly legally placed in the hands of the court as a whole. Descisions were made by the appropriate minister and then put to a vote by the court as a whole; perhaps understandably people where worn out by the old factionalism. Nor was there the kind of all domineering personality as had been in the days of Maud.
There have been accusations, particularly by later historians that this form of cautious moderate goverment led to stagnation and lack of imagination and there may well be truth in that. Nevertheless it did keep the country prosperous, safe and at peace for twelve years and Cummascach was old enough to take over. The young king came to power in a realm that was all his great-grandfather, that first Maurice who was Earl of Desmond might have wished for.
Indeed the time of Cummascach already seemed to belong to quite a different era in his lifetime, this the first King of Ireland to never remember a time when there had not been a kingdom. The old world of independent nobles was but a distant memory, and soon not even that and with it the age of the Lordship of Ireland and it's relics. Within a few decades so entrenched would the FitzGeralds become as one of the great royal families of Europe that few could ever recall a time when they had been merely the lords of poor and distant Desmond, a small Earldom of no great importance.
*
There remains little to tell.
There was a story, possibly acroprycal, often repeated in the era of Cummascach that told of a wandering bard who had once ate dinner with a noble lord in Desmond.
The meal was excellent and hearty fair, and of high quality as was the wine yet the bard was quite surprised to find himself eating off plain wooden plates and drinking out of wooden cups. Why, he asked the nobleman, had he gone to so much trouble with the meal if he did not have the silver and gold to do it justice?
Young Maurice, who was then the Earl, answered him so:
"I do not invest in such luxuries when the money can be better spent on the meal - meat tastes the same off wood or gold. That is why some men fail and some succeed; those that are more interested in the appearance of wealth and power usually lack the stomach to digest it. Those who want the substance know it tastes the same no matter how it's served."
fin
