Religious conflict in Ireland, 1500-1660

The early modern period witnessed the establishment of deeply-entrenched rival religious confessions in Ireland, which exhibited a constant potential for sectarian conflict down to the close of the twentieth century. This process was carried to its extreme in the northern province of Ulster where early modern Protestant immigration into Ireland reached its highest point, resulting in the development of a Catholic identity which was essentially Irish in its ethnic composition, a substantially Scottish Presbyterian strand, and a politically-dominant Anglican population of largely English origin.1 But even in the southern provinces of Connacht, Leinster and Munster, the basis of what was to become an independent and highly Catholic state in the twentieth century, as a result of the events of the early modern period different local religious communities were forced into an uneasy co-existence. Outside Ulster, the complicating admixture of Protestant dissent and Scottish ethnicity was much reduced and few localities did not display a large Catholic majority, but the political dominance of the established church ensured at least a thin overlay of Protestants throughout the island, although in places such as parts of Connacht their numbers were extremely insignificant. Sectarian difference did not entail permanent conflict, mutual co-existence was the historical norm rather than the exception, yet the confessional identities were always at least latently antagonistic and when violence erupted it could take extraordinarily virulent forms. In this regard, the middle of the seventeenth century was arguably the period of greatest strife and loss of life, which copper-fastened the process of religious polarisation.

The confessional divisions which had become so starkly evident in the seventeenth century were predicated on the political developments of the previous century. In this regard, no one fact is of more salience than the expansion of the power of the English state in the island, particularly from the 1530s until the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1603. In the early sixteenth century, Ireland was in political terms highly fragmented. The monarch of England claimed the lordship of the entire island, dating from a twelfth century conquest, but the area under the direct control of the crown had dwindled from the high point of the late 1200s to little more than four shires around Dublin, the Pale, together with a number of port towns. The English presence in Ireland was also bolstered by a number of great aristocratic lordships of Anglo-Norman origin, such as the FitzGerald earls of Kildare and the Butlers of Ormond which acknowledged their feudal bond to the English king and participated in the affairs of the English colony but, in practice, presided over largely autonomous territories. Rather than a secure holding of the crown, most of the island was in fact divided between a congeries of up to sixty different Gaelic lordships, with perhaps another thirty Gaelicised kin-groups of English descent. The Gaelic population was not considered, except in certain minority cases, as the monarch’s legitimate subjects and stood outside his law under the general definition of the king’s Irish enemies. The world of the lordships was highly militarised and characterised by almost constant, if low-level, warfare. An awareness of ethnic differences between the Gaelic population (who saw themselves as Gaedhil, an identity which also encompassed the inhabitants of much of Scotland) and the English ( the Gaill 1 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Presbyterian Revolution in Ulster, 1660-1690’, Studies in Church History 25 The Churches, Ireland and the Irish eds. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 159-170; Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603-41 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).

in Irish) certainly existed on both sides of the divide but patterns of warfare and alliance were chiefly dictated by issues of geo-political utility and profit rather than by ethnic hostility.2

The population of the island was overwhelmingly Christian but the ethnic spectrum running from Gaelic to Gaelicised to colonial English was reflected in substantial differences in religious practice and organisation in different parts of the island. The Gaelic church, the ecclesia inter hibernicos, exhibited a number of features which rendered it anomalous in the context of late medieval Western Catholicism. Prior to the creation of a regular organisation of dioceses and parishes in the twelfth century, the Irish church had primarily been structured around monasteries. Deriving from this, most ecclesiastical land in Gaelic areas was in the hands of clerical families whose duties included the maintenance of parish churches, the provision of hospitality for the Episcopal household in its circuits through the diocese, and the payment of rent to the bishop.3 Within the ecclesia inter hibernicos, most notably in the thirteen dioceses to which a Gaelic Irish bishop was invariably appointed, clerical marriage and the succession of sons of clerics to church positions had become routine. Reflecting the lack of urban development in Gaelic Ireland, the church was both profoundly rural and poverty-stricken, with large, sprawling parishes. Clerical participation in the endemic if generally low-level violence which characterised the world of the Gaelic lordships was common, with the 1522 murder of the bishop of Leighlin, Maurice Doran, by an archdeacon (and son of a Cistercian abbot), Maurice Kavanagh, who resented his rebukes, a particularly flagrant example.4 Such features of the church represented its adaptation to the political and social structures of the Gaelic world. But although anomalous and the object of considerable English disdain, Gaelic Christianity was not entirely divorced from the mainstream of the European church. A 1546 visitation of the Gaelic portions of the archdiocese of Armagh recorded a depressing picture of poverty, ruined churches and breaches of clerical celibacy, but in other respects the conduct of the clergy was impressive, with regular celebration of Mass, Matins and Evensong.5 In spiritual terms, the most vital element of the Gaelic church was certainly the mendicant orders which witnessed a notable expansion in the course of the fifteenth century, particularly in terms of the establishment of numerous independent observant congregations, as well as the conversion of older houses to a stricter interpretation of the rule. This appeal of observant reform was also evident in the English-dominated areas of the island but the friars enjoyed particularly high status in Gaelic Ireland, where they also dominated the study of theology.6 Ireland also experienced an exceptional late medieval efflorescence of the Franciscan Third Order Regular with the foundation of over forty houses.7

2 Steven G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603: English expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Longman, 1998), 31-50.3Ibid., 193-54 Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: a historical survey (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1985), 55. 5 Henry Jefferies, Priests and Prelates of Armagh in the Age of Reformation 1518-1556 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp.77-81.6 Ellis, Age of the Tudors, 196-7.7 Corish, Catholic Experience, p. 57.

Of the thirty-two sees in Ireland, ten were invariably held by Englishmen in the late medieval period and the ecclesiastical organisation of the ecclesia inter anglicos corresponded more closely to the European norm and the practice of contemporary England. Senior ecclesiastics including bishops were nominated by the crown and their activities circumscribed by the law, with state control of Episcopal temporalia and proscribed limits on the functions of ecclesiastical courts.8 Bishops were frequently hard-working and conscientious pastors, although they often doubled up as part of the secular government, holding important offices such as the lord chancellorship.

The religious division between the English and Gaelic parts of the island represented a spectrum of practice and organization and was by no means absolute. While ethnic identity determined the choice of bishops in most dioceses, a group of nine sees could traditionally be held by either Gaelic or English incumbents. By virtue of the presence of an English cardinal-protector at Rome from 1492, the monarch of England could exercise significant influence over the appointment of bishops in Gaelic Ireland. And surprisingly efficacious mechanisms existed to allow ecclesiastical institutions span the ethnic divide. This has been most intensively studied with regard to the archdiocese of Armagh, the primatial see on the island, which extended through the territory of the most powerful Gaelic lordship of O’Neill to the north of the Pale, the nerve centre of the English colony. The archbishop resided in the English part of the diocese, generally at Termonfeckin. Parliamentary legislation technically debarred Gaelic Irishman from holding benefices in English districts but in practice they frequently occupied poorer livings while the richer incumbencies were monopolized by men of English blood. In the Gaelic deaneries, the dean of Armagh, who acted as chairman of the cathedral chapter, was in practice the most important source of clerical authority. Despite not inconsiderable tensions, a variegated framework of ministry bridged the divide between the differing ethnic communities. 9

Shared religious institutions carried the potential to provoke racial animosity, however. In 1496, the General Chapter of the Cistercians established a national congregation and appointed special reformers in an attempt to restore the order’s evident decline but poisonous ethnic tensions undermined the attempt. Abbot Troy of Mellifont, one of the designated reformers from the English colony, eventually petitioned for relief from his duties because of the life-threatening violence to which he had been exposed in his attempts at visitation of monasteries in Gaelic Ireland.10 Of critical importance with regard to ethnic animosity was the degree to which their religious practice and organization sustained the English of Ireland’s conviction of cultural superiority vis-à-vis the Gaelic population. This belief was particularly significant with regard to the clerical leadership of the colony, which interpreted the historical role of their community as a mission to reform Gaelic Ireland. Attachment to the canonical practices of late medieval Catholicism thus formed an important aspect of the identity of English-Ireland prior to the Reformation. Such sentiments represented a potential reservoir of resistance to attempts to alter the fabric of the medieval English Catholic legacy in Ireland. This was particularly the case because, hand-in-hand with the English colony’s conviction of a mission civilitrice, went a creeping and justified anxiety about the cultural infiltration of 8 J.A. Watt, ‘The Church and the Two Nations in Late Medieval Armagh’, Sheils and Wood, Studies in Church History 25, 37-54.9 Ibid., Armagh possesses unique source material in this regard: see also Jefferies, Priests and Prelates.10 Ellis, Age of the Tudors, p. 198

English-Ireland by Gaelic practices, language and customs. The evident degree of Gaelicisation at work within the colonial community arguably helped to cultivate a conservative and embattled mentality which, in a context of economic and political alienation later in the century, evolved relatively easily into hostility towards the innovations of the Reformation. 11

The great religious upheavals which followed Luther’s breach with Rome left effectively no mark on Ireland during the 1520s and early 1530s. Unlike Scotland and England, there was no burning of heretics, largely because there was no evidence of heresy. This was hardly surprising.In contrast to England Ireland had no tradition of Lollardy and it was not marked by the level of anti-clericalism evident in neighbouring contemporary Scotland. Nor was there a university to provide a focus-point for religious debate. Ireland thus lacked any semblance of a native evangelical movement which could be mobilized to create momentum for religious change. In this context, any alteration in the religious practice or belief of the population depended almost entirely on the state’s ability to inculcate or coerce a desire for conformity. In this regard, the king’s representatives in Ireland faced greater challenges than in the formidably centralized Tudor monarchy in England. Despite this, the strong attachment to the monarchy on the part of the existing English colonial community was an important potential resource. Moreover, this was supplemented by a pragmatic willingness on the part of Gaelic dynasts within the lordships to barter religious concessions for perceived political and legal advantages.12 In addition, although lacking the urban centres which proved hospitable to religious reform on the continent, Gaelic culture was certainly not inherently inimical to Protestantism. On the contrary, neighbouring parts of Gaelic Scotland were soon to demonstrate an adaptation of Calvinist doctrine and norms to a rural environment at least as successful as anywhere else in Europe.13

But the pattern of religious change in Ireland’s different communities ultimately did not follow the pattern of either Scotland or England, nor indeed of Wales.14 Rather than a successful implantation of the Reformation, the sixteenth century instead witnessed a growing attachment to Catholicism on the part of both the Gaelic Irish and the community generally referred to as the Old English, namely the pre-Elizabethan colony. The reasons for Ireland’s singularity within the context of the religious history of the archipelago as a whole has been the subject of much historiographical debate.15 Such

11 James Murray, ‘The diocese of Dublin in the sixteenth century: clerical opposition and the failure of the reformation’ in History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin, eds. James Kelly and Daire Keogh, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 92-111.12 S. J. Connolly, Contested Island, Ireland 1460-1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90-114.13 Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’ in Calvinism in Europe 1540-1620 ed, Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 231-53.14 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: the Origins of the British Problem’, in The British Problem, c. 1534-1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (London: Macmillan, 1996), 39-65.15 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation of Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 475-502; Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation failed in Ireland: une question mal posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30 (1979):423-50; Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Why the Reformation failed in Ireland : Une Question Bien Posée’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985) 197-200; S.G. Ellis, ‘Economic Problems of the Church: why the reformation failed in Ireland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990): 239-65; Karl Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Irish Reformation in European

debate has highlighted divisions within the English political and ecclesiastical elite concerning the best way of inculcating religious change16 and has emphasized the inadequate financial structures inherited by the established church in the wake of the Reformation.17 The adoption of a comparative approach, particularly the case of Norway and Denmark, has also served to indicate that neither the language barrier on the island nor the externality of the Reformation impulse can in themselves be taken as sufficient reasons for Protestant failure.18 Of critical importance in Ireland, however, was the manner in which the change of the religious complexion of the state occurred in tandem with the expansion of English power throughout the island. This fatal co-incidence deeply affected the reaction of both the Gaelic and English communities of the island to the religious initiatives imported from Tudor England.19

In the decades prior to the English Reformation, the actual administration of the lordship of Ireland had essentially been discharged on behalf of the English monarch by a process of aristocratic delegation. Great noblemen of the English colony in Ireland, pre-eminently the FitzGerald earls of Kildare, acted as viceroys for their monarch. As a political system this had the overwhelming merit of being cheap, if highly unsatisfactory from all other perspectives. The recovering power of the Tudor monarchy under Henry VII and Henry VIII was increasingly tempted to tinker with this system of aristocratic delegation which eventually detonated a rebellion by the FitzGeralds of Kildare in 1534. This rebellion owed little or nothing to genuine religious dissatisfaction but it attempted to legitimize itself and to draw wider support on the grounds of the king’s repudiation of Rome, thus foreshadowing a critical pattern of linkage between political rebellion and religious justification. The FitzGerald rebellion was repressed ruthlessly but its political reverberations continued to manifest themselves for the rest of the century. From this point on until a brief period in the 1640s, aristocratic delegation was abandoned and instead English government in Ireland was entrusted, not to native-born members of the existing colony. but to administrators dispatched from England. At the same time, the vastly increased expense of government devolved in a most unwelcome fashion onto the crown. Ultimately, financial pressures were to lead to a series of constitutional initiatives, of which the most important was the kingship act of 1541, which attempted to absorb the Gaelic population of the island within the framework of a new Irish kingdom in which they too, in addition to the existing English colony, would be the king’s subjects. This vast project of cultural engineering, however, critically under-estimated the difficulties inherent in absorbing the Gaelic and Gaelicised lordships. Rather than a cheap and easy

Perspective,’ Archive for Reformation History 89 (1998): 313-353; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘A Typical Anomaly? The Success of the Irish Counter-Reformation” in European Encounters: Essays in honour of Albert Lovett, ed Judith Devlin and Ronan Fanning (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), pp. 78-96; Ciaran Brady and James Murray, ‘Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland’ in Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700, ed. Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben, (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 14-39.16 Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy’; Brady and Murray, ‘Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland’..17 Ellis, ‘Economic Problems of the Church’.18 Bottigheimer and Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Irish Reformation in European Perspective’.19 Ibid.; this also is emphasised for different reasons in Bradshaw, ‘Tudor Reformation’ and David Edwards, ‘The Escalation of Violence in Sixteenth Century Ireland” in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 34-78.

solution to the crown’s difficulties, the new intrusiveness of English government in Ireland gradually provoked an escalating resistance. Thus, the English state unintentionally found itself involved in an on-going series of conflicts which ultimately necessitated what became an extraordinarily bloody and expensive conquest of the island.20

This period of crisis, which witnessed the political ruin of a succession of English governors as they proved incapable of solving the intractable problem which Ireland was becoming, laid the basis for the alienation of the Irish population, both colonial and Gaelic, from the administration and the religion which of necessity it was forced to champion and support. As Ireland became a sink for English treasure, the state could spare few resources for the evangelization of the population. In this regard, the failure to establish a university in Ireland at a time when confessional allegiance were still relatively fluid was probably of particular importance.21 In the event Trinity College was not founded until the 1590s, at which point patterns of confessional allegiance were becoming sufficiently rigid that few of the English of Ireland were prepared to enroll there as students.22 Even more significantly, the effects of the endemic financial crisis of late Tudor Ireland gradually eroded the willingness of the local English population to follow their government down a path of religious innovation.

With the exception of the proctors of the lower clergy, the colonial community did not offer much parliamentary resistance to the initial rupture with Rome in 1536-7. The limited nature of the Henrician reforms, a concern to re-emphasise the community’s loyalty, particularly in the context of the recent Kildare rebellion, and the crown’s traditional role as a patron of religious reform in Ireland all combined to suppress whatever scruples may have been present in the colonial laity. The dissolution of monasteries and mendicant houses was also accomplished smoothly in the English areas of the island and generous grants of church land rewarded the acquiescence of the local laity. Significantly, little or no of the profits which accrued from this ecclesiastical windfall were re-invested in institutions which could offer training to a new ministry. Clerical hostility to the royal supremacy clearly existed and the reforming archbishop of Dublin, George Browne, complained bitterly of how senior clergy within his diocese undermined attempts to preach the new official doctrine. The Lord Deputy, Lord Leonard Grey, contributed to Browne’s frustration by refusing to co-operate with attempts to discipline showpiece offenders who denied the supremacy and upheld the pope’s authority, probably out of a desire not to complicate the delicate politics in the aftermath of the Kildare rebellion by offending local religious sensibilities. Browne himself, the chief source of reforming energy, was soon hamstrung by the shift towards more conservative positions in England in 1539 with the act of the Six Articles. Since Browne was married, he was forced to seek the goodwill of the local clergy in providing for his now highly inconvenient offspring and wife which rendered further attempts to coerce

20 Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976); Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536-1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Edwards, ‘Escalation of Violence’; Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994).21 The failure to use the revenues of St Patrick’s cathedral to establish a university is explored in James Murray, ‘St Patrick’s Cathedral and the University Question in Ireland C. 1547-1585’ in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 1-21.22 Alan Ford, ‘Who went to Trinity? The early students of Dublin university’ in ibid., 53-74.

them to implement religious change impractical. 23 Overall, therefore, the muted reaction in Ireland to the Henrician Reformation was probably symptomatic of the feebleness with which it impacted on the actual practice of the population’s devotions and practice. After the old king’s death in 1547, however, aspects of the Edwardian Reformation proved significantly unpopular. Elements of the ecclesiastical elite were bitterly hostile to both clerical marriage and the denial of transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Eucharist, while a strong attachment to the traditional form of the Mass was evident at a popular level.24 Bishops who had supported the Royal Supremacy reported the unease of the people in the face of the Edwardian reforms.25 The archbishop of Armagh, George Dowdall, steadfastly and successfully refused to implement liturgical changes and ultimately left the country in protest. His English replacement in 1552, Hugh Goodacre, died the following year in Dublin, by poison procured by certain of his priests according to one of his Episcopal colleagues, John Bale.26 Bale, like Goodacre, was English and a talented preacher who was shocked at the traditional nature of the worship which he encountered in Ireland. His untypical determination to push forward with liturgical changes and a theology which dismissed notions of Purgatory, prayers for the dead and good works, and which emphasized preaching rather than the transformative role of the priest in the ritual of the Eucharist, brought to the fore the latent possibilities of conflict between the official proscriptions of the Edwardian Reformation and local attachment to traditional practice. Following Mary’s accession to the throne, Bale recorded that five of his servants had been killed, apparently for hay-cutting on a Marian feast-day. He believed that a plot against his own life was also in preparation and he departed into exile, bitterly noting the glee with which the clergy of his diocese restored the paraphernalia and actions of Catholic worship.27

That the Marian restoration of Catholicism was generally welcomed in Ireland seems certain. In sharp contrast to England, there were no burnings of those deemed unrepentant heretics, nor any indication of any need for such sharp medicine. The returned primate, George Dowdall, was keen to weed out married clergy and four bishops were deprived of their sees but figures who showed penitence were allowed to seek other benefices.28 Dowdall also wished to see a university established but significantly no such institution was founded, thus depriving the new Elizabethan government of a vital evangelical tool when it came to power in 1558.

Under Elizabeth the religious pendulum lurched again, creating a church which was theologically Protestant, although with strong Catholic liturgical overtones. Shaken by the narrowness of the legislative ratification of the religious settlement in England,

23 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘George Browne, First Reformation Archbishop of Dublin 1536-1554’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), 301-26; James Murray, ‘Ecclesiastical Justice and the Enforcement of the of the Reformation: The Case of Archbishop Browne and the Clergy of Dublin’ in As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation ed. Alan Ford, J.I. McGuire and Kenneth Milne (Dublin: 1995), 3-51; Connolly, Contested Island, 90-9.24 Brady and Murray, ‘Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland’, 27-9.25 Ellis, Age of the Tudors, 221.26 Jefferies, Priests and Prelates, 159-60.27 Katherine Walsh, ‘Deliberate provocation or reforming zeal? John Bale as first Church of Ireland bishop of Ossory (1552/53-1563)’ in Taking Sides: Colonial and Confessional Mentalités in Early Modern Ireland ed. Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (Dulin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 42-60;Ellis, Age of the Tudors, 221-3.28 Ellis, Age of the Tudors, 223-4.

Elizabeth’s government prepared carefully for a parliament in her western kingdom which ultimately smoothly passed the Irish counterpart, re-imposing a uniformity act devoid of offensive references to the pope or overt denial of the real presence.29 Despite the parliamentary success, however, the inculcation of active acceptance for the changes passed into law remained an enormous challenge. Compared to England, even the richest dioceses of the pre-Reformation Irish church were distinctly poor.30 And since the break with Rome, the financial position had significantly deteriorated, despite the dissolution of the monasteries, since most of the profits had been siphoned off to compensate for governmental expenditure or to purchase local support. The situation continued to disimprove as hard-pressed clergy capitalized their assets by granting long-term low rent leases of church land in return for entry fines. The administration also contributed by mining church resources for secular purposes: the profits of three rectories and the tithes of five parishes were earmarked for the use of the Lord Deputy and a lay Lord Chancellor was made Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Moreover, in many parishes, in some dioceses the clear majority, the right of advowson lay not with the church’s bishops but with members of the local laity who were free to indulge their conservative instincts in the appointment of clergy. Thus the state church lacked attractive benefices to entice an educated preaching ministry to Ireland and without a university or a system of free schools there were no institutions capable of training one within the island. Elizabeth’s church was also to be hampered by the weakness of its coercive apparatus. The administrative machinery of the original settlement in the face of refusal of the Oath of Supremacy was cumbersome and enforcement of lay uniformity through the Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes was largely ineffective because of the refusal of local juries to co-operate.31 Moreover, unlike England where the financial penalties against recusancy were ferociously updated in the course of the reign and sheltering a priest became a capital crime,32 in Ireland such legislation was not introduced until the English Act of 1585 was made applicable to the island under the Commonwealth.33

The difficulties in inculcating support for the new religious dispensation among the English of Ireland were vastly aggravated by the political and financial demands resulting from endemic rebellion and war with the lordships of Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland. From the mid 1550s, the colonial community bore a much larger share of the cost of this escalating series of conflicts. Under desperate pressure, the government resorted to a series of expedients to finance their government, which included debasing the currency, and extorting support from the local population for a vastly increased military apparatus, by the exploitation of customary rights of supply for the governor’s retinue and the constant billeting of soldiers.34 By the end of the sixteenth century, the effect of such measures were leading to the complete undermining of the structure and

29Ibid.,, 225-6.30 Ellis, ‘Economic problems of the church’, 248-9.31 Aidan Clarke, ‘Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland’ in Sheils and Wood, Studies in Church History 25, 105-22, there, 112- 114.32 A. Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 45-71. 33 T.C. Barnard, ‘Conclusion: Settling and Unsettling Ireland: The Cromwellian and Williamite Revolutions’, in Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-60 ed. Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 265-91, there 283.34 Brady, The Chief Governors: the rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536-1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 215-44.

economy of previously flourishing towns, such as Athboy and Kells.35 The increasing dominance of English-born officials and the displacement of locals within the administration drove a further wedge between the government and the disgruntled colonial community. The bloated demands of the military apparatus also created economic opportunities, particularly in the industries of milling and brewing but these fell disproportionately into the hands of English mercantile families, perceived as politically reliable by the government. Towards the end of the century, also, governmental distrust meant that towns like Carrickfergus became increasingly favoured at the expense of established urban centres of the English colony, such as Drogheda.

By the later 1570s, the English of Ireland increasingly perceived themselves as the victim of a series of governmental innovation. The defensive conservatism to which this gave rise found particular expression in an ecclesiastical patriotism36 which was deeply unwilling to countenance change in traditional practices, rights and structures. At the same time, criticism was increasingly directed at the suspect religious practices of the Old English by frustrated administrators. This was at times a tactic consciously deployed as a means to delegitimise the accusations of governmental abuse which the older colonial community attempted to bring to the queen’s attention. But it was tied also to wider discourse of loyalty in the latter part of the sixteenth century in Ireland. 37 Increasingly in the Irish localities, the captains, seneschals and presidents who represented the expansion of the English state came in their casual violence and arbitrary justice to resemble the Gaelic and Gaelicised warlords whom they were intended to replace.38 What distinguished them was their self-proclaimed loyalty to their sovereign, which was expressed as a principal aspect of their honour.39 To newcomers who lacked a stake in the existing status quo the emphasis on loyalty offered significant advantages. These were most clearly evident in comparison with the putatively barbarous and inherently rebellious Gaelic population but it was religion which offered the principal occasion for criticism of the disloyalty of the older colonial community.

The rebellion in 1580 of James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglas, acted as a harbinger of the potential of religion to mobilise dissatisfaction. Baltinglas, a member of the Pale elite, had been imprisoned briefly in 1578 for a refusal to pay a fine for avoidance of the religious services of the established church. Baltinglas was personally convinced of the impossibility that a woman could be a fit governor of Christ’s church and this intuition seemed confirmed by the oppressiveness of the government which she had instituted in Ireland. He attracted a following of younger sons of Pale gentry families, in a fusion of religion with political and economic disaffection. 40 Militarily, the Pale element of the

35 ‘The humble requests of the captains of Ireland’ (18 May 1598), Calendar of State Papers Ireland 1598-9, p. 148.36 John Bossy, ‘Catholicity and Nationality in the north European Counter-Reformation’ in Religion and National Identity: studies in church history ed. Stuart Mews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 285-96. 37 See for example Sir Henry Sidney to Elizabeth ,20 May 1577 (Lambeth Ms 607), p. 48.38 David Edwards, ‘Ideology and Experience: Spenser’s View and Martial Law in Ireland’ in Political Ideology in Ireland , ed. Hiram Morgan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 127-57.39 William Palmer, ‘That Insolent Liberty: Honour, Rites of Power and Persuasion in Sixteenth century Ireland,’ Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993), 308-327.40Christopher Maginn, ‘The Baltinglass Rebellion, 1580: English Dissent or a Gaelic Uprising?’, The Historical Journal 47, 2 92004), 205-232; Colm Lennon, An Irish Prisoner of Conscience of the Tudor Era: Archbishop Richard Creagh of Armagh, 1523-86 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 124-5.

rebellion was a fiasco but its suppression was followed by renewed unrest in 1581 which linked conspiracy in the English colony to raiding by Gaelic Irish septs in support of the Western Pale leader William Nugent. The over-reaction of the government to movements which enjoyed only minority support culminated in the torture and execution under martial law of the papally appointed archbishop of Cashel, Dermot O’Hurley in 1584, which created the first eminent martyr of the Catholic tradition in early modern Ireland. 41

While governmental severity was a deterrent to outright rebellion it probably contributed to the elaboration of an “Old English” colonial identity increasingly hostile to Protestant innovation. One of the most important effects of the gathering pace of religious alienation was the increasing number of Old English youths who began to seek university education in the Catholic states of the continent. From the early 1590s this process was accelerated by the foundation of the first of a string of continental Irish colleges. By the fifth decade of the seventeenth century no fewer than eighteen of these establishments had been founded42 and they were to play a central role in forming a trained clerical elite who were to exert enormous influence on the Catholic community, not least because in apparent contrast with England, continentally-trained priests whether Gaelic or English generally tended to return to their native localities.43

The watershed decade of the 1590s also faced the English state in Ireland with its greatest military challenge from a formidable coalition of Gaelic lordships in Ulster, backed by intermittent Spanish support. The political loyalty of the Old English was a major factor in suppressing what became a countrywide insurrection but the crisis further hampered the state in either building an effectively evangelical church or in any genuine attempts to suppress the increasingly assertive Catholicism of the colonial community. On Elizabeth’s death in 1603 it had become evident that the Old English identity in Ireland, while still professing loyalty to their monarch, was now confessionally orientated towards Rome.44

The level of religious conflict between the state and the English colonial community in the course of the sixteenth century was actually relatively low. While genuine attachment to traditional religious practices and structures cannot be underestimated, it seems probable that it was the economic and social effects of the conquest of Gaelic Ireland, both in terms of the alienation which it caused and the limits which it placed on the state’s capacity to either evangelise or coerce religious conformity, which played the key role in ensuring that the pattern of religious change in English Ireland differed markedly from England itself. What was chiefly a symptom of the alienation of the community from its government in the later Tudor era, however, rapidly became a primary cause of further conflict in the century that followed.

The effects of war were to be seen even more clearly in the world of the Gaelic and Gaelicised lordships which suffered the brunt of the crown’s military expansion in the period after 1534. Since the erection of the Irish kingdom in 1541, the crown had aspired to absorb the population of the entire island as loyal subjects. The Tudor state however lacked the necessary finance, cultural sensitivity, political knowledge and

41 Connolly, Contested Island, 209-10.42 For an introduction to this still under-researched phenomenon see T.J. Walsh, The Irish Continental College Movement: The Colleges at Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Lille (Dublin and Cork, 1973).43 Ó hAnnracháin, ‘A Typical Anomaly?’, 86.44 Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (snd edition, Dublin: Four Courts Press), 38-49.

consistency of administrative approach necessary to bring such a difficult task to fruition. Instead of peaceful assimilation, the expansion of the state resulted in escalating conflict. Unsurprisingly, the Gaelic and Gaelicised dynasts who rebelled against the crown framed their resistance as religiously motivated. This was frequently in an attempt to gain continental assistance and was probably often highly cynical. Certainly, the anti-heretical rhetoric of the Kildare rebellion and the Geraldine league in the 1530s was quickly abandoned in the wake of the kingship act of 1541, which offered to protect the Gaelic lordships from outright conquest.45 But the explicative power of such narratives deepened as the Tudor crisis in Ireland worsened in the latter half of the century. Recent research has focused on the degree to which the expansion of the state served to escalate the severity of violence in Ireland from the middle of the sixteenth century. By simply mustering larger forces with better weaponry and employing more systematic scorched earth tactics than had previously been seen in Ireland, the crown’s forces could cause significantly more casualties in the course of a campaign than the armies of a Gaelic dynast. In addition, the pre-emptive nature of many of the state’s campaigns, the widespread use of martial law, not merely against the peasantry but also against members of the social elite such as poets, and a demonstrable willingness to target non-combatant as well as military personnel resulted in a pattern of colonial warfare in which far larger numbers of people died than in the more localized violence of the early sixteenth century.46 In 1569, antagonism towards the new intrusiveness of English government within the province of Munster fused with a religious conviction that the English title to Ireland had been forfeited due to heresy in the person of James FitzMaurice FitzGerald, the strongman of the substantially Gaelicised Desmond lordship.47 Fitzmaurice helped spark a series of rebellions in the lordships of Munster and Connacht which were repressed with great severity and he eventually went into exile on the continent. There, he touted for Catholic support against the excommunicated queen and he returned to Ireland in 1579 in the company of a papal legate, Dr Nicholas Sanders, in the prosecution of a holy war against Elizabeth. The rebellion which followed owed much to the resentments experienced by many members of the Gaelic elite in Munster in their adaptation to closer supervision by the province by a lord president but religion provided a rallying cry and the hope of external assistance. It was this element which helped inspire Baltinglas’s insurrection in the Pale the following year. The extraordinarily brutal repression of the rebellion resulted in large tracts of the province of Munster being turned into a wasteland and the resulting deaths of what may have been a third of the population.48 The deathtoll from the crown’s counter-insurrectionary tactics in this decade was probably exceeded at the close of the century in the face of the great rebellion of Hugh O’Neill when state forces openly targeted the entire population of the rebellious lordships in Ulster.49 O’Neill and his closest confederate Hugh O’Donnell emphasized the religious dimensions of their war and made use of a variety of Irish ecclesiastics to promulgate their case on the continent. By highlighting the confessional dimension of the struggle the Ulster

45 Connolly, Contested Island, 102-3, 113-4.46 Edwards, ‘Escalation of Violence’, 53-70.47 Anthony McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463-1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 110-17, 160-2.48 Ibid., 193-4.49 Vincent Carey, ‘What pen can paint or tears atone? Mountjoy’s scorched earth campaign’, in The Battle of Kinsale ed. Hiram Morgan (Bray: Wordwell, 2004), 205-16.

confederates clearly hoped to influence the Old English population of the island but their appeals were also directed to Spain and the continent.50 Although recent research suggests that O’Neill’s commitment was greater than has previously been realized,51 it remains difficult to judge how genuinely the Ulster leaders were attached to the cause of the Catholic religion in the course of the Nine Years War. Nevertheless, a growing hostility towards the state church was clearly visible among the elite of Gaelic Ireland, particularly sections of the clergy. 52 A contributory factor to this alienation was undoubtedly the fact that, even in areas spared the campaigns of extermination visited upon Munster and Ulster in the latter part of the century, the face of English government could be extraordinarily harsh. The failure of peaceful assimilation provoked the exertion of militaristic control over large portions of the island which had been brought under the jurisdiction of the state. Inevitably, given the decentralized nature of the Early Modern English state, positions of authority as seneschals and lords president were granted to individuals who sought to use their office as a means of personal enrichment. Martial law became widely used as a conventional instrument of administration which offered boundless possibilities for exploitation and corruption on the part of men whose compensation for the difficulties and dangers of life on the frontier was the possibility of advancement in wealth and social status. 53

Operating in tandem with what became the brutal conquest of Gaelic Ireland was an almost complete failure of evangelization. Unlike Tudor Wales, the state church failed dismally to exploit the vernacular language of the non-English speaking population. There was little or no provision of Gaelic religious material in print: the first printed book, effectively a catechism, appeared in 1571 but was probably not widely disseminated. Neither a New Testament nor a translation of the Book of Common Prayer was printed in the Irish language until the seventeenth century.54 Educated ministers capable of preaching in Irish could not be trained without a university which did not exist until the 1590s. In its early years Trinity College clearly attracted a number of Gaelic Irish students55 but their impact was largely swallowed up by the development of the continental Catholic colleges, particularly after the foundation in 1607 of St Anthony’s of Louvain which rapidly developed into the power-house of the Gaelic Counter-Reformation. Thus the state church squandered the possibilities of exploiting such bridges to traditional Gaelic religious practice as the tradition of clerical marriage or of evangelizing a population with a relatively high level of ignorance. Instead, a profound drift towards post-tridentine Catholicism became apparent in the alienated and often displaced elites of Gaelic Ireland, whose secure world-view, based on a frame-work of feuding but culturally linked Gaelic lordships, was in the process of shattering at the hands of aggressive foreigners, animated by the conviction of their own cultural 50 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘The Strategic Involvement of continental powers in Ireland, 1596-1691’ in Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth Century Ireland ed. Pádraig Lenihan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 25-52, there, 33-5. 51 Thomas O’ Connor, ‘Hugh O’Neill: free spirit, religious chameleon or ardent Catholic? in Morgan, Kinsale, 59-72.52 Ellis, Age of the Tudors, 256-7; Marc Caball, ‘Innovation and tradition: Irish Gaelic responses to early modern conquest and colonization’ in Morgan, Political Ideology in Ireland, 62-82.53 Edwards, ‘Ideology and Experience’; Brady, Chief Governors, 271-86.54 Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125-34.55 Ford, ‘Who went to Trinity?’, 62-6.

superiority. 56 The highlighting of Catholicism, the religion of developed European states, as an issue of conflict had clear compensatory value in the face of the obvious political, military and technological superiority of the Elizabethan state. The development of communities in exile in Catholic Europe greatly assisted this process for it encouraged the creation of an identity which re-interpreted the wars and dislocations of the sixteenth century as the product of heretical aggression towards a Catholic people, as evidenced for instance in Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (Lisbon, 1621). Such narratives not only assisted in gaining sympathy from the host society but also probably provided a comprehensible framework in which to situate the enormous changes of the previous decades and they clearly gained considerable currency in Catholic Europe.57

Thus, while religion was probably a relatively peripheral factor in terms of creating conflict between the state and Gaelic Ireland during the sixteenth, it was increasingly foregrounded as an issue of importance by the native elites. Such ideas probably gained further traction because of the inability of the state to engage with them. The dominant tendency among the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean administrators in Ireland was to dismiss religion as an issue of contention.58 The emphasis on the barbarism of Gaelic Ireland was underpinned by an implicit assumption that Protestantization would naturally occur in tandem with other aspects of the civilizing process of Anglicization.

*The accession in 1603 of James VI of Scotland as James I of England and Ireland

and the concurrent end of the Nine Years War, was anticipated in many parts of Ireland as the dawning of a right to religious tolerance. In a number of towns, churches were reclaimed for Catholic worship and there were some minor clashes with the state forces dispatched to quell the unrest, which led ultimately to a plan to establish citadels in Munster towns.59 Sir Arthur Chichester, the lord deputy appointed in 1604, was fervently committed to following the instructions which he received from the new king to advance the cause of the reformed religion. Chichester had been a particularly savage participant in the repression of the great rebellion and had suffered familial losses. In addition to his profound dislike of it as a “wicked religion”, he was convinced of the linkage between Catholicism and disloyalty. Keen to avail of the opportunities provided by the governmental victory in the Nine Years war, between 1605-07 he drove forward a policy of selective religious coercion by sending written mandates to named individuals to attend the services of the Established church, on pain of punishment, not under the relatively weak statutory penalties, but under the king’s prerogative powers. This was supplemented by a proclamation banishing Catholic priests. The policy, first targeted at the Old English population of the Pale and then in Munster, sparked a storm of protest. The lord deputy was prepared to provoke armed rebellion if necessary in pursuit of his objectives but the lack of support from England undermined the confrontational approach. The strategy was discreetly abandoned in 1607 amid fears in London that it was driving the Old English population to make common cause with potentially

56 Caball, ‘Innovation and tradition’, 75-6.57 See for example the memorials of Mazarin’s government quoted in Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645-49 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142.58 Ford, Protestant Reformation, 52-3.59 Anthony Sheehan, ‘The Recusancy Revolt of 1603: A Reinterpretation’, Archivium Hibernicum xxxviii (1983), 3-13.

rebellious elements in Gaelic Ireland, most notably Hugh O’Neill.60 Anxieties in this regard were then enhanced by O’Neill’s flight to the continent which led ultimately to the confiscation of six counties in north-west Ulster, and their plantation with English and Scottish settlers. This was followed by a series of smaller plantations in the midlands and Wexford which operated in tandem with the ongoing revival of the sixteenth century Munster plantation.61 Together with substantial inward migration of private individuals, these state-sponsored schemes had a significant effect on the confessional politics of the island.

The incomers were by no means uniformly Protestant. Sizeable number of English Catholics chose to emigrate to Ireland where they fused relatively easily with the existing colonial community, a fact which has tended to reduce their visibility until relatively recently.62 Nevertheless, it was the Protestant dimension of this immigration which was of greatest importance. The decades down to 1641 saw the first development of a genuine Irish Protestant identity. Although still a relatively small minority of the total population, immigration allowed for the development of a community which monopolized office-holding in the central administration and, as a result of a cynical creation of seats in the wake of the Ulster plantation, held an artificial majority in the Irish House of Commons on the rare occasions that parliament was summoned. The creation of peerages, the conversion of aristocratic Catholic minors through state wardship and the Episcopal bench of the state church ensured Protestant dominance in the upper house as well. By virtue of state favour in the acquisition of leases and estates, the ability to import economically productive tenants and improved livestock from England, and the market possibilities of forest clearance, the immigrant Protestant population made dramatic economic progress in the decades between the peace of 1603 and 1641. Many of these economic advances were at the expense of Gaelic Irish landowning families who were victims of state discrimination in addition to their cultural difficulties in adapting to a new dispensation. The burgeoning Protestant community also skillfully defrauded both the established church and the crown of many of the profits which should have accrued from the new peace in Ireland. But down to 1633, the state was generally prepared to turn a blind eye to the fraudulent practices of Irish protestants because of what was perceived as the more dubious loyalty of the Catholic majority and because significant interests in England also derived advantages from their enrichment.63

Parallel with these developments was the emergence of a genuine Protestant church with a university educated English-speaking ministry. As a church it catered principally for the existing Protestant community in Ireland which was largely of recent Scottish and English origin. While strongly anti-catholic in its ideological orientation, Irish Protestantism showed little success in any evangelical context.64 From the perception of 60 John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chicester Lord Deputy of Ireland 1605-16 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1998), 111-28.61 Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster (Dublin 1984); Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-1641 (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1986).62 David Edwards, ‘A Haven of Popery: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of the Plantations’ in The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Alan Ford and John McCafferty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95-126.63 The most comprehensive coverage of these various processes is provided in Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); see also Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 1616-28: A Study in Anglo-Irish Politics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).64 Ford, Protestant Reformation, 222-4.

its leaders, both ecclesiastical and lay, the major reason for its lack of success in converting the Catholic majority lay in English reluctance to use coercion to disrupt the activities of the Catholic clergy and to force at least the elites of the Gaelic and Old English populations to attend the services of the established church. Without such support, they recognized that Catholicism’s hold over the allegiances of the general population was unbreakable.

The considerable frustration occasioned by the English Privy Council’s insistence that Chichester’s mandates policy be abandoned, however,did not signal the end of attempts by the Irish Protestant elite to enforce conformity. Partially motivated by the conviction that real progress had been made during the brief period of coercion between 1605 and 1607, Chichester and his successor as lord deputy Oliver St. John, the archbishop of Dublin and chancellor, Adam Loftus, and Thomas Jones, bishop of Meath, implemented what measures they could: attempts were made to curtail the numbers of youths receiving education on the continent, legal action was taken against obstinate recusants in the towns, juries who failed to convict Catholics for recusancy were fined and Catholic lawyers were excluded from courts and there were a number of executions of Catholic clergy, including the bishop of Down and Connor, Conor O’Devaney. The intellectual underpinnings of this policy derived from a traditional Augustinian conviction in the need for religious conviction in the face of obdurate error, a fervent anti-Catholicism buttressed by the widespread belief that the Catholic church was antichristian, and the application of an apocalyptic reading of the Book of Revelation to the events of the Early Modern period.65

Such governmental policies created major unease and a profound sense of grievance among the Catholic community but accomplished little in terms of religious change. State intimidation reached a peak around the parliament of 1613 which, by a massive creation of boroughs guaranteed to return Protestant M.P.s, transformed what had previously been a source of protection for Irish Catholics into a potential vehicle for administrative aggression.66 Yet the king was not prepared to countenance an all-out assault on Catholicism. He could be sharp in his denunciations of Catholic disloyalty and reacted angrily to anything which he saw as brazen defiance of his laws but in the main he restrained his Irish government from behavior from anything harsh enough to produce either outright resistance or real success in forcing conformity. In the 1620s, Catholics saw two opportunities to convert this uneasy toleration into something more definite. The first was by virtue of concessions related to the Spanish match planned between the Infanta and Prince Charles. In the event, the marriage negotiations provoked war with Spain but this seemed to offer even greater possibilities to Irish Catholics. In effect, they bartered their financial support in the war against Spain for a series of concessions entitled the Graces. Although the money was provided to the crown, the royal concessions were not ultimately granted, increasing the sense of grievance. 67 Instead, the Dublin government fell into the hands of Irish Protestants who increased the level of harassment of Catholic clergy and laity down until the appointment of a new lord deputy from England, Thomas Wentworth, in 1632.65 Alan Ford, ‘Force and Fear of Punishment: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603-33’ in Boran and Gribben, Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 91-130.66 Dave Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515-1642: The Rise and fall of Butler feudal power (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 272-3; McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, 182-3.67Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625-42 (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1966) 28-89.

The first three decades of the seventeenth century thus witnessed a hardening of confessional boundaries. Despite the evolution of an Irish Protestant community, the bulk of the population remained Catholic. Whether Gaelic or Old English, the Catholics of the island did not scruple to offer temporal allegiance to the Stuart monarchy. This was most heartfelt among the Old English but the fact that the dynasty was descended from Gaelic Irish royal houses was also foregrounded by Gaelic poets to emphasize the legitimacy of Stuart rule.68 Nevertheless, as increasing numbers of Catholic clergy returned to Ireland after education in continental seminaries the barriers between the king’s church and his Irish subjects solidified. Increasingly, the degree to which the church established by law had not been embraced by the majority of the population was thrown into sharp relief by the elaboration of a shadow Catholic church. Between 1618 and 1630, Rome established an underground hierarchy in Ireland which set to work to cement the process of confessional affiliation in the localities. In the face of what was, by European standards, miserable poverty and constant fear of state harassment, these bishops nevertheless were able to discharge most of their functions. Indeed, by creating difficult but not impossible conditions for their activity, the state may ironically heightened their impact because, in addition to their pastoral roles, they carried the cachet of men leading apostolic lives of danger and indigence. Importantly, this movement of Catholic renewal was not confined to Old English areas of the island but also occurred spontaneously in Gaelic areas.69 At a literary level, this saw the publication of Bonaventura Ó hEodhasa’s simple catechism, An Teagasc Críosdaidhe (Antwerp, 1611) as well as tracts for a more sophisticated readership, notably Aodh MacAingil’s Scáthán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Louvain, 1618) which discussed confession within the context of the ten commandments rather than the more traditional framework of the seven deadly sins, and Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire’s Sgáthán an chrábhaidh (Louvain, 1616) which adapted original Spanish devotional work to encompass matters of contemporary Irish interest, such as the relationship between Catholic clergy and laity in the context of state harassment, and the nature and limits of the authority of the temporal power. In addition to these printed texts, the Munster priest Geoffrey Keating produced a number of highly important works which circulated in manuscript. Eochair-sgiath an Aifrinn presented contemporary Catholic teaching on the Mass in a simple form for an Irish audience and evidently evolved into a clerical handbook and source for sermons in the localities. Tr í bior-ghaoithe an bháis fused the author’s seminary training on the continent with twenty years pastoral experience in Ireland to warn the educated Catholic community of their religious obligations in the face of the inevitability of death. Most influential of all was his great mytho-historical work, Foras feasa ar Éirinn, which created a history of the origins of the Éireannaigh (Irish), but one crucially which defined them in religious terms as Catholic rather than ethnically as Gaelic or English.70 Seventeenth century translations of works such as Francis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie devote, Savonarola’s Triumphus crucis and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Vida divina were also completed.71

68 Breandán Ó Buachalla, Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn: Cing Séamus’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 83 C(1983), 81-134.69 Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation, 41-68.70 Bernadette Cunningham, The World of GeoffreyKeating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 3-58; Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn, 1603-1788 (Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1996), 42-3.

These works were aimed at a Catholic audience. They were orientated at solidifying their readers and hearers in their beliefs and practices and at inoculating them with hostility to Protestant error. The fairly dismal failure of the state church to evangelise in Irish, with a few honourable exceptions such as bishop Bedell in Kilmore, helped compensate for the difficulty in producing and importing Irish language material. English-speaking Ireland was of course more exposed to the literary polemics of Protestant and Catholic Englishmen, although a number of specifically Irish controversial battles also took place. The most important of these were both initiated by Jesuits, Henry FitzSimon, who took up cudgels against John Rider in the early years of the century, and William Malone, against James Ussher in the 1620s. Fitzsimon’s clashes with Rider encompassed both spoken and written disputation and in both the style of argumentation and the issues debated, most notably that of authority within the church, mirrored similar clashes between Protestant and Catholic Englishmen.72 Ussher and Malone dueled in print over other common controversial ground such as the date of the supposed corruption of the church of Rome and the beliefs and practices of the primitive church.73 Perhaps the most distinctive element of Irish confessional writing was the differing efforts on both sides of the religious divide to make use of the glorious history of the ancient Irish church. In terms of Irish Protestantism, James Ussher was to the fore in this regard in attempting to claim his own church as the true heir of the traditions of the early Irish saints and scholars, particularly in A discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (London, 1631).74 On the Catholic side, the Franciscans at Louvain were at the centre of a major project of hagiography designed to buttress the historical Catholic credentials of the Irish, in particular those of Gaelic stock. In large part, this was orientated at continental Europe as part of the effort to contest English calumniation of Gaelic barbarism but it had a useful by-product in terms of resisting Old English notions of ethnic and religious superiority.75

Increasing confessional polarization carried an obvious potential for conflict. Riots, in which women and youths (as legal minors less liable to prosecution) often took a principal part, were not uncommon in the face of state attempts to arrest or harass Catholic clergy.76 The fact that confessional divisions were becoming more entrenched at a time of rapid social and economic change was a particularly ominous development. In the main, it was the elite of the Gaelic Irish population which adapted with greatest difficulty to the changed economic conditions of the seventeenth century. In addition to

71 Charles Dillon, ‘Irish translation in continental Europe, 1630-60’ in Irish Communities in Early-Modern Europe ed. Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 383-392.72 Brian Jackson, ‘The Construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious controversy in Dublin, 1599-1614’ in British interventions in Early Modern Ireland eds Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 97-115.73 Declan Gaffney, ‘The practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600-41’ in Sheils and Wood, Studies in Church History 25, 145-58.74 Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Printing in Early Seventeenth-Century Dublin: Combating Heresy in Serpentine Times’ in Boran and Gribben, Enforcing Reformation, 40-65, there, 55.75 See for example the correspondence on the necessity of a Gaelic Irish primate of Ireland (Archivio storico della Sacra Congragazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli o de ‘Propaganda Fide’, Scritture Originali riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali, 140, f. rv.)76 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Theory in the absence of fact: Irish Women and the Catholic Reformation’ in Pawns or Players: Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 141-154

actual land confiscation, patterns of Gaelic indebtedness and alienation of land through mortgage are strongly visible in the period before 1641. Much of this property was transferred to Old English merchants but rapid advancement of the Protestant minority also occurred.77 The appointment of Thomas Wentworth as governor in 1632 served to create a heightened atmosphere of grievance and tension. Wentworth, operating in a singularly duplicitious fashion, not only failed to confirm the Graces, but initiated a process of confiscation which threw into jeopardy the rights of all Catholic landowners. Simultaneously, he aggravated the local Protestant interest by investigating their past corruptions and instigating an unpopular ecclesiastical policy. Wentworth’s long-term objectives included the creation of a Protestant church with the economic foundations to evangelise the general population. While creating those structures, he kept harassment of Catholic clergy at a relatively low level. The anxieties of the Catholic population, however, about the course of state policy increased dramatically under his governorship.78

In 1641, the accumulated social, ethnic and confessional tensions of the previous century exploded. The collapse of Stuart government and the emergence of the militantly Protestant Scottish Covenanters and English long parliament provoked a defensive rebellion in Ireland. Initially intended as a coup d’état the rebellion sparked off a series of brutal sectarian encounters throughout the island as the local Protestant population was attacked in every county of the island. Much of the violence was occasioned by social and economic resentments of the immigrant population and the manner in which it had advanced itself with the aid of state discrimination and favour. But, crucially, it was religion which provided the normative structure which legitimized the attacks. In addition to the actual robbery, stripping and murder of Protestants, the bibles and service books of the Established church were destroyed in a ritual fashion and Protestants corpses were denied interment in consecrated ground, and sometimes there was an outright refusal to bury them at all. Underpinning the attacks was evidently a deep conviction, evidently the fruit of Catholic preaching over the previous three decades, that heresy made of Protestants the devil’s creatures and rendered them unworthy to be part of the community, and hence vulnerable to expulsion or murder as part of a process of purification.79

In areas which remained under state control, the response of the armed forces and the settler community was frequently indiscriminate and extraordinarily harsh. Indeed, it seems clear that many of the most grisly atrocities on both sides were conceived by their perpetrators as acts of reprisal for real or imagined acts of brutality by their adversaries.80 The outbreak of the first civil war in England prevented the repression of the rebellion and by 1642 the Confederate Catholics of Ireland had established an association and a de facto state in most of the island, based on an alliance between the secular elite and the ecclesiastical leadership of the Catholic population, who endorsed a war in the defense of religion but who abhorred the social unrest unleashed during the insurrection. The Confederate Catholics moved swiftly to transfer the property of the Established church to

77 The best study of these complex changes is Canny, Making Irish British.78 Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland: A study in absolutism 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).79 Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation, 20-2; Brian Mac Cuarta, ‘Religious violence against settlers in south Ulster, 1641-2” in Edwards, Age of Atrocity, 154-75.80 Kenneth Nicholls, ‘The other massacre: English killings of Irish, 1641-2” in Edwards, Age of Atrocity,, 176-191, there, 186-9.

its Catholic counterpart but it was not apparently until 1646, as a result of the pressure from an Italian nuncio, GianBattista Rinuccini, that the right of Protestants to worship publicly in the area under their control was definitively rescinded.81

The conflict which developed in Ireland carried obvious overtones of a religious war. As the name denoted, the Confederate Catholics were bound together by religion. In their oath of Association they swore to protect the rights of the Roman church. As the decade wore, however, stresses became increasingly apparent between, on the one hand, those confederates who were prepared to accept a compromise peace with their embattled monarch, in return for guarantees of toleration of private practice of their religion and recognition of their status as true subjects, and, on the other, a more radical clerical party who demanded the vindication of the Catholic Church’s right to property and jurisdiction.82 Eventually tensions in this regard exploded into a civil war in 1648 in which the clericalist faction was defeated. This opened the way to a peace settlement with Charles I’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, the Marquis of Ormond, in 1649.

From the perspective of the royalist party, the conflict in Ireland as in Britain, however, was conceived principally in terms of loyalty and rebellion. Nevertheless, as in Britain a determination not to abandon the established church was critical in establishing the parameters of what could be offered to the Confederate Catholics. Only when a party of the Confederates abandoned the attempts to secure independent rights for their church was a peace settlement with the royalist party possible.83

Ultimately, however, the attitudes of the Parliamentarian leadership proved more significant as their victory in the second English Civil War in 1648 was followed by the conquest of Ireland in the period 1649-53. An extraordinary measure of religious hostility was expressed towards Irish papists by the parliamentary side throughout the 1640s. Anti-catholic sentiment was deeply entrenched as a leit-motif of both Irish and British Protestant identity and the conviction that hundreds of thousands of Irish Protestants had been murdered in a Catholic conspiracy sharpened the appetite for vengeance. In 1642 the supposed murder count stood at 154,000, by 1646 this had doubled in Sir John Temple’s extraordinarily important published account, and it doubled again in John Milton’s calculation at the end of the decade, despite the fact that the Protestant population probably did not amount to even 100,000 in 1641.84 Temple was also particularly influential in his contention that the rebellion had involved the entire Catholic population, Old English as well as Irish, and that the clergy had played a principal role. During the 1640s, parliament routinely executed its Irish prisoners, with those taken at sea thrown overboard to drown.

Yet although detestation of Catholicism as an anti-Christian religion was deeply influential within Protestant perspectives of the conflict in Ireland there was also a degree of resistance to the idea that a religious conflict was in fact taking place. From the

81Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘In imitation of that holy patron of prelates, St Charles: Episcopal activity in Ireland and the formation of a confessional identity, 1618-53’ in Ford and McCafferty, Origins of Sectarianism, 73-94. 82 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Conflicting loyalties, conflicted rebels: Political and Religious Allegiance among the Confederate Catholics of Ireland’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), 851-72.83 Robert Armstrong, ‘Ormond, the confederate peace talks and protestant royalism’ in Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 122-140.84 Toby Barnard, ‘1641: A bibliographical Essay’ in Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993), 173-186.

excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, it had been possible for Irish and English Protestants to frame the repression of Catholicism as a legitimate state response to disloyal subjects who traitorously offered their allegiance to a foreign power. Sixteenth century Irish history, with its litany of Gaelic rebellion, and Old English discontent with and subversion of the state’s policies, seemed to provide compelling evidence of the fundamental disloyalty of Catholics. A large dose of self-interest made this analysis even more palatable for it was self-evident that power and state favour should be channeled only in the direction of the loyal and that the imposition of recusancy fines could shift the burden of funding government onto the Catholic community.85 Moreover, particularly with regard to the ethnically Gaelic portions of the population, notions of barbarism seamlessly intermingled with a horror of Popish superstition.86 Indeed, the English Protestant conviction that Popishness represented the corruption of true religion rather than a religious attitude helped to reinforce notions that the struggle in Ireland was as much between English civility and Irish barbarism as between the forces of Christ and anti-Christ. To deny the religious status of the conflict was particularly enabling for the Interregnum government which reconquered the island between 1649-53. Confessional militancy and hatred of Catholicism certainly figured prominently in the mindset of the victorious saints of the English revolution. But this went hand in hand with a deep reluctance to countenance the coercion of conscience or religious persecution. The manipulation of the ignorant barbarous hatred of the Irish for the English by an evil leadership, particularly the clergy, could be portrayed as the root cause of the rebellion of 1641.87 In this context, the campaign of conquest promised not merely retribution but ultimately salvation for the ignorant Irish. This was particularly evident in Oliver Cromwell’s apoplectic response to the Irish clergy’s declaration of opposition from Clonmacnoise, when he identified them as the agents of anti-Christ who had kept the food of the Word from the people which the conquerors would rectify.88

In this context, it was hardly surprising that the period of the conquest represented the most ferocious period of persecution of the Catholic church in the entire early modern period. The initial tone was set at Drogheda in 1649 when Catholic religious were, as Cromwell himself admitted, ‘knocked on the head promiscuously’;89 in the early years of the war many priests, including three bishops, were executed summarily on capture. But from 1651 and increasingly after 1654 it became more customary to ship abroad captured members of the priesthood. Probably at least a thousand priests were exiled during this period. Catholic school teachers also faced significant persecution and many were arrested and transported to a life of indentured servitude.90 Operating in tandem with what may have amounted to a twenty per cent mortality rate as a result of conquest, the savage

85 Ford, ‘Religious coercion in Ireland’86 Palmer, Language and Conquest, 15-16.87 Norah Carlin, ‘Extreme or mainstream?: the English Independents and the Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland, 1649-1651’ in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 eds. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 209-226.88 The letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell with elucidations by Thomas Carlyle ed. S.C. Lomas (3 vols, London: 1904), 2, 5-23.89 Oliver Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, 17 Sept. 1649 in The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. W. C. Abbott (Oxford: 3 vols, Clarendon Press, 1989) ii, 128.90 Patrick Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime, 1650-60’ in A New History of Ireland III, eds. T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976), 375-86.

anti-partisan compaign which accompanied the formal military struggle, famine and pestilence, and a land settlement which was savagely punitive towards Catholic proprietors, it was hardly surprising that the Cromwellian period became lodged in the Irish Catholic consciousness as a period of horror and religious martyrdom.91 This was particularly the case because the Interregnum regime’s efforts at evangelisation of the Catholic population were hardly more successful than the State church in the period prior to 1641.92 The other great legacy of the 1650s was to ensure that a unitary Irish Protestant identity was no longer possible, most especially because of the strength of the position which Presbyterianism had acquired in Ulster.93

*The violence of the mid-seventeenth century gave a permanence and solidity to

the religious polarization of the island’s different communities. 94 The severity and potency of these divisions rendered Ireland unique within the multiple monarchy of the Stuart and later the Hanoverian dynasties. In this regard, of major importance was the manner in which sectarian divisions in Ireland became mapped onto pre-existing ethnic categorizations and antagonisms. Thus the often horrific inter-confessional violence which took place in Ireland during the 1640s and 1650s can be linked, not only to the excesses of the French wars of religion or the Thirty Years War in continental Europe, but also with the extraordinarily brutal events of the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth century where, despite a gradually increasing element of confessional differentiation as the century wore on, the primary motor of violence was ethnic and cultural difference rather than religious polarization. To a much greater extent than, for instance, England and France, religious divisions in early modern Ireland did not create rifts within communities on the basis of confessional attachment but became mapped onto previously existing ethnic and cultural differences. Because relatively few of the pre-Elizabethan population embraced the state church, religious issues thus became and remained inextricably entangled in the ethnic and colonial resentments of the Gaelic and Old English population and the often rapacious desire of New English colonisers to make good their position of political and confessional dominance in economic and social terms as well. It is for this reason that one of the most distinguished of Irish historians of this period has recently suggested that the mid-seventeenth century conflict in Ireland should properly be described as “ethno-religious” and has argued that its closest parallel was in the Ukraine rather than any other part of Western Europe. In both cases, he posits that the merging of ethnic and religious identities, Polish/Catholic and Russian/Orthodox in the Ukraine and English/Protestant and Irish/Catholic in Ireland, resulted in a severity of strife that other areas of the continent were not forced to experience.95

Nor did the effects of the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century quickly dissipate. Differing historical memories of those harrowing decades became entrenched as vital 91 Pádraig Lenihan, ‘War and population, 1649-52’, Irish Economic and Social History 24 (1987), 1-21; Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 1-4, 211-13, 224-44.92 T.C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 175-80.93 Robert Armstrong, ‘Ireland’s puritan revolution? The origins of Ulster Presbyterianism reconsidered’, English historical review 121 (2006), 1048-74.94 Nicholas Canny, Making Irish British (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)95 Nicholls, ‘The other massacre’, 188-191; in Ireland the principal victims of this process of merging were the Old English of Ireland.

constitutive factors within the rival religious identities on the island. For Irish Protestants, the onslaught of 1641, Ireland’s St Bartholomew’s day, was constantly and consciously re-evoked to emphasise the minority community’s vulnerability and the necessity for constant watchfulness and political repression of Irish Catholics.96 On the Catholic side of the pendulum, the events of the Cromwellian conquest of the late 1640s and 1650s fused with an existing historical mythology of the wars of the sixteenth century in a potent narrative of Catholic suffering and dispossession, which was then amplified in the wake of the Williamite wars of the late seventeenth century and continued to resonate long past the achievement of independence in the south of the island.97

96 Toby Barnard, ‘The Uses of October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebration’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 889-920.97 Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin: Helicon Press, 1981), 47-9; for examples of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography of Catholic victimization see :M.J. Brenan, An Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (Dublin: J. Coyne, 1840); Thomas Walsh and D.P. Conyngham, Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (N.Y.: Kenedy, 1898); P.F. Moran, Historical Sketch f the Persecutions suffered by the Catholics of Ireland under the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans (Dublin, 1907); MV. Ronan, The Reformation in Dublin 1536-1558 (from original sources) (London: Longmans, Green & co., 1926).