Henry VIII 
The foreign nature of Ireland’s Reformation was key to its failure, writes John McCafferty
All over the world 2017 will mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. What happened here in Ireland? Why did this island remain overwhelmingly Catholic even though its rulers were Protestant? How did religious changes get sucked into the long and troubled relationship between England and Ireland?
In 1632, James Spottiswoode was rowed out into the middle of Lough Derg in Co.Donegal. He was a Scot, ordained in the Church of England, who had become Church of Ireland Bishop of Clogher in 1621. In his hand he had permission from Dublin Castle to demolish “the chapel and all the Irish houses now situate in that island called St Patrick’s purgatory”.
It did not go well. The high sheriff of Donegal failed to turn up to support him. The bishop and his companions were nearly sunk and then nearly marooned. Meanwhile onlookers, the ‘country people’, stood by and waited for a divine thunderbolt while Spottiswoode dashed about toppling hostels, chapels and other devotional structures erected by the Franciscans only a few years earlier.
All this happened just four years short of the 100th anniversary of the passage of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in the Irish parliament. By that date – 1636 – Lough Derg was once again open for business as Catholic Ireland’s leading pilgrimage site. James Spottiswoode had wasted his time and risked the lives of his servants.
Ireland had no popular Protestant uprising, none of the outpouring of evangelical feeling that took place elsewhere in Europe, instead getting a reformation based on laws. Ireland got an English reformation, yet while state-sponsored religious change in England worked out in the long run, it failed in Ireland.
This was not inevitable, and was not expected. For example, in Lent 1542, Paschase Broet and Alphonse Salmeron became the first two Jesuits to set foot in Ireland. After a cool reception from the powerful lords Conn O’Neill and Manus O’Donnell, they concluded Ireland would definitely follow Henry VIII into schism.
Time Lag
So what was Henry VIII’s schismatic Church of Ireland, his Hibernia Ecclesia anyway? Put simply, the Church of Ireland was the product of the Dublin parliament’s ratification of a series of English statutes. The English Act of Supremacy of 1534 was followed by an Irish Act of Supremacy in 1536. So Ireland, it seemed, was just England with a little time lag.
The Irish ‘reformation’ parliament of 1536-7 put through Acts of Supremacy, Appeals, Slander, First Fruits, Against the authority of the Bishop of Rome – all mirroring Westminster a couple of years earlier. Apart from cosmetic changes such as replacing ‘England’ with ‘Ireland’ in the wording of bills they were virtually identical.
Henry VIII’s Dublin parliament also passed an Act for the English order, habit and language – the kind of anglicising legislation that had been famously attempted at Kilkenny in 1366. This 1537 statute decreed that English-speaking clergy get priority in parish appointments. Every Irish-speaking priest was to take an oath at ordination to endeavour to learn the “English tongue…to the uttermost of his power, wit and cunning”.
Having done so he was then to instruct his flock. So pastors were to become instruments of anglicisation in a church of which Henry and his heirs would be supreme heads. This church made the acquisition and spread of English language and manners a priority.
Four years later Ireland’s constitutional status was changed in the 1541 Act for kingly title. So Henry VIII attempted by strategy, by policy, and by law to make all of the inhabitants of Ireland into his obedient subjects and into Englishmen and Englishwomen and lead them into schism with Rome all at once.
Like today, 16th-Century Ireland had over 20 dioceses. Most bishoprics were poor. This turned into a poisoned chalice for the state church. Places like Killaloe, Cloyne, Ferns, Kilfenora, Leighlin, Dromore – indeed a majority of sites – were pretty much dilapidated by the time of the Tudors and Stuarts.
Yet the very title ‘Church of Ireland’ meant that authorities shied away from logical pastoral proposals for mergers of dioceses and relocations of cathedral churches to more populous towns. Dublin Castle found it almost impossible to give away dioceses such as Ardfert and Kilmore. Impoverished bishops began to lease away see lands with manic intensity simply to make ends meet. Discredit followed on dilapidation. Catholics in turn took delight in declaring that the Reformation was propelled by avarice and rapine.
Many of the Church of Ireland bishops had little Irish experience and so found themselves strangers in a strange land, disliked and alien. Their headaches were worsened by the defiant existence of a rival continentally-trained episcopate who held identical titles.
The bishops appointed by Rome were locals, sons of the well-connected, who were supported by voluntary contributions and free to work in the towns that counted. Moreover many of the old cities like Waterford and Limerick possessed chartered liberties which allowed corporations to hamper the state church if they chose – and some chose to do so.
Most spectacularly of all, the Old English, descended from the Norman settlers, overwhelmingly decided to try to remain loyal to the Crown and to the Holy See at the same time.
Theirs is another story. The moral of this part of the story is that what ended by working well in England often backfired in Ireland. Elizabeth I’s achievement was the creation of a church “which looked Catholic and sounded Protestant”. Her Church of England worked out to be a national majority but her Church of Ireland a mainly settler minority.
Even dissolution of the monasteries and nunneries, the greatest fissure in English religious life, which did so much to secure aristocratic and moneyed support for Henry VIII’s policies, played out in almost farcical reverse on this side of the water.
By the end of Henry VIII’s reign in 1547 only 55% of Ireland’s 140 monasteries and 40% of about 200 mendicant houses had been suppressed. Donegal friary, for example, a key Franciscan house, kept functioning up into the early 1600s – more than 60 years after its official ‘close-by’ date!
By the 1570s, Dubliners were actually siphoning off the profits from the dissolved monastery lands that they had been granted to pay for the upkeep of the new Catholic seminary clerics. ‘Massing’ priests in the Pale area were often better off than the established church incumbents. Here, at least, the Pope did better from dissolution than the king.
Temptation
There can be a temptation to ask when it was ‘all over’ for the project of creating a Protestant Ireland. Many people, especially in the sectarian heat of the 19th-Century, tried to argue that the Irish were incapable of becoming Protestant. It was never ‘all over’, of course. If it had been there would be no Protestant churches today. But the Englishness of Ireland’s reformation was critical.
Timing too – as ever – was also critical. England ended up with a vigorous church that mixed Henry VIII’s state-sponsored schism with a Calvinist theology which took firm root during Elizabeth I’s long reign, but attempted religious change in Ireland took place against a backdrop of warfare, vast confiscations of land, and multiple plantations.
Indeed, all of the big things that historians point to as making that Church of England work – Henry’s Act of Supremacy (1534), the Prayer Book (1559), the Thirty Nine Articles (1571), the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) – arrived in Ireland at differing dates and into very different conditions.
To put it starkly: none of them, none at all, were designed or intended for Irish conditions.
Martin Luther made services in languages people spoke and understood the key to his reformation. Here, given the official commitment to anglicisation and a long tradition of seeing Irish as barbarous, translations of scripture and service books were long delayed.
While a brief catechism in Irish Gaelic was issued in 1567 there was no New Testament until 1602, no Common Prayer Book until 1608, and no Old Testament until 1685. This compares woefully with Wales where the Welsh-speaking state church succeeded.
By contrast, the Gaelic typeface in the exile Irish college at Louvain stamped out Bonabhentura Ó hEoghusa’s uncompromisingly counter-reformation Teagasg Críosdaidhe (catechism), Flaithre Ó Maolconaire’s Desiderius, which was based on a popular Spanish devotional text and Aodh MacAingil’s tract on confession Scáthán Shacramuinte na Aithridhe, which was based on the teaching on the 14th session of the Council of Trent.
So, as it happened, the church with the Latin liturgy would do the bulk of its pastoral work in the Gaelic tongue. Irish (Europe’s oldest written vernacular) was far from being an ebbing tide. It would fuel an ebulliently Catholic piety that drew deeply on tradition and cultivated a new type of patriotism.
Tradition was not just on the tongue, it was also in the eye of the beholder. In June 1580 the Church of Ireland Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Marmaduke Midleton, complained that “the windows and walls of the churches are still full of images. They will not deface them, and I dare not for fear of tumult”. Official iconoclasm more or less began and ended in 1540-41 and focused only on a few high profile relics such as the Bachall Ísu in Christchurch and the image of Our Lady of Trim.
Worship
The old medieval fabric of worship remained intact in many parish churches for many years. As late as 1631 there were parish churches in the Dublin diocese still in use for Mass. Even the dead began to declare allegiance as burials switched to ruined abbeys and friaries. The living openly crowded around holy wells even at the very walls of Dublin, the royal capital. In the heart of cities ‘mass houses’ were opulently kitted out, barely discreet. On St Stephen’s Day 1629 raids on a religious houses on Cook street ended with Lancelot Bulkeley, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, and a detachment of musketeers bolting for the Castle under a hail of stones from furious worshippers.
Catholicism could never become ‘old-time’ religion in Ireland because it never went away, not even for a little. Unlike England the pre-Reformation medieval church was neither phased out nor obliterated. The result was that old late medieval ways persisted long enough to be transformed into new Tridentine ways. Yet the majority did more than ‘keep the faith’ – they created, over time, an equation of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Catholic’.
Martyrdom made its depressing return to these islands in the 16th and 17th Centuries. When Bishop Conor O’Devaney was executed in 1612 at Oxmanstown in Dublin, thousands turned out to watch his procession to the gallows and in doing so expressed their hostility to the government’s religious policies. The authorities were powerless to stop the open rush for relics – the inverse of England where the crowds were inclined to mock and Catholics were careful to stay quiet. These new martyr cults became a badge of orthodoxy for both Catholics in Ireland and the thousands in exile abroad.
Choices
The gallows also became a venue for display of sectarian sentiment. On November 18, 1581 the Nugents or ‘Baltinglass’ rebels approached the scaffold reciting the Ave Maria. When approached by Thomas Jones, Church of Ireland minister, they shouted “vade satana, vade satana, vade post me satana” (get behind me Satan). Once the majority of people had made their choices in the 1560s and 1570s there were very few conversions either way as sectarian identity froze out religious fluidity. Irish Protestants were saturated with the apocalyptic anti-Catholicism of their English origins. They thought the Pope the Antichrist.
At about the same time many Catholics in Ireland began to express an anti-Protestantism which insisted on these very same English origins. In his entry in the Annals of the Four Masters for 1537 the Franciscan Mícheál Ó Cléirigh noted: “A heresy and new error sprang up in England through pride, vain-glory, avarice and lust…so that the men of England went into opposition to the Pope and Rome and they also appointed bishops for themselves.”
Here is a verse from the late 1570s:
“An chliar-sa anois tig anall
Cliar dhall ar a ndeachaidh ceo,
ní mó leo muire ná dog,
dar by God ní rachaidh leo
“These clergymen who have come from the
Other side – blind clergy enveloped in
Fog, respect a dog more than Mary. And,
By God, they shall not get away with it.”
The same poet called on Ireland to resist Captain Luther and Captain Calvin through adherence to ‘General’ St Patrick and so to avoid becoming an inferior replica of England. Everywhere in Europe – whether among Protestants or Catholics – rhymes and songs played a key part in moulding popular religious feeling. So in this country those few Gaelic clerics who did conform such as Maol Muire Mac Craith (Miler McGrath), Archbishop of Cashel from 1571-1622, invited particular poetic spleen:
“You empty, befogged churchmen, you shall live in hell;
Whilst Mary’s clergy shall flourish fruitfully, high up in God’s heaven
Maol-without-Mary you are a fool. You journey not towards heaven.
A Maol-without-Mass, a Maol-without-canonical hours is a
Maol destined for hell with its savage pain
“An archbishop and his wife, and a suffragan of unclean
Life, who breaks the fast and burns statues, shall have only bitter
Fire for ever and ever”
This is not easy language. These are the bitter words from a society where the state had tried – and failed – to determine religious allegiance. Almost everything that ultimately made state reform in England a success – the language, the old ecclesiastical structures, the law, the towns, the aristocracy and gentry, the lawyers, the habits of obedience – had the opposite effect in Ireland.
The Church of Ireland was saddled from the start with a policy that insisted on anglicising Ireland just as much as preaching the Gospel. An evangelical reformed Irish-speaking church was not really attempted at all in 16th- and 17th-Century Ireland.
Something else happened though, something unexpected. The pressures created by trying to operate an English reformation on this side of the Irish Sea unintentionally helped create a vision of an Ireland that had not existed before. That vision was of Ireland as a Catholic kingdom whose inhabitants were Catholics who held obedience to Rome as vital to their existence.
The really unexpected fruit of Henry VIII’s reformation – a belief that to be Irish was to be Catholic – would have a long and troubled future ahead of it.
Prof. John McCafferty is a member of the UCD Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute and the UCD School of History and Archives.
