Ireland

The Reformation period

Rumours that Kildare had been executed precipitated the rebellion of his son, Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly, called Silken Thomas. The rebellion facilitated the transition to the new system. Silken Thomas had opposed Henry VIII’s breach with Rome; his rebellion failed and he was executed in 1537. This caused a revival of the power of the Butlers of Ormonde; Piers Butler, earl of Ossory, helped to secure the enactment of royal (instead of papal) ecclesiastical supremacy by the Dublin Parliament of 1536–37. As a further step in shedding papal authority, in 1541 a complaisant Parliament recognized Henry VIII as king of Ireland (his predecessors had held the title of lord of Ireland). Confiscation of monastic property, as well as the lands of the rebels, met most of the costs of the expanded administration. This loss of land inevitably drove the religious orders and the Anglo-Irish into the arms of the Gaelic Irish, thus weakening the old ethnic rivalries of medieval Ireland.

Sir Anthony Saint Leger, lord deputy in 1540–48 and again in 1550–56, then began a conciliatory policy by which outstanding lords were persuaded to renounce the pope and recognize the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy in order to gain new titles and grants of lands. This policy, however, required a steady series of efficient governors and disciplined administrators; in fact, neither in Tudor nor in Stuart times did the English succeed in converting elective chiefs into hereditary nobles holding offices delegated by the crown. Moreover, even those who had recently submitted were often condemned for religious conservatism and deprived of their lands. Saint Leger’s personal success was all the more remarkable because the first Jesuit mission to Ireland arrived in the north in 1542.

Under Edward VI (1547–53) the Dublin authorities carried out a forward policy in religion as well as in politics, but Protestantism got no support except from English officials. The official restoration of Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary (1553–58) revealed the strength of resentment in Ireland against Protestantism. As in England, the papal jurisdiction was restored, but otherwise the Tudor regulations of authority were observed. The pope was induced to recognize the conversion of the Tudor Irish lordship into a kingdom. Finally Mary gave statutory approval for the plantation (or resettlement of Irish lands by Englishmen) of Leix, Offaly, and other Irish lordships of the central plain. Her viceroy was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, lord deputy (1556–59), who was soon, as lord lieutenant (1559–66) for Elizabeth I, to restore the state’s authority over the church.