The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (16 page)

In the years that followed, indeed, the English presence in Ireland reached its nadir – this in spite of the renewed interest displayed by the Tudors. The country’s population had still not begun to recover from the ravages of the fourteenth century; moreover, Henry’s intelligence services, controlled by Thomas Cromwell, informed him that Kildare was governing the colony solely in the interest of his own family and faction. In Dublin, the city’s infrastructure was crumbling (the castle had to be evacuated for fear that its buildings would collapse); the Pale was being raided at will; and Kildare was expending the colony’s slender strength in bitter feuds and internal strife. He was recalled to London in the autumn of 1533: before leaving Ireland, he appointed his impetuous son Thomas FitzGerald (1513–37) – nicknamed ‘Silken Thomas’ on account of his fondness for fine clothes and trappings – deputy governor in his absence, and a chain of momentous events was set in motion. In June the following year, having heard (false) rumours that his father was dead, Silken Thomas convened a council meeting at St Mary’s Abbey on the northern bank of the river Liffey opposite Dublin Castle. Here, on 11 June, he threw down his sword of state – the symbol of his office – and formally and publicly rejected the authority of the king; adding for good measure the public pronouncement that Henry’s recent marriage to Anne Boleyn was illegal and that the king was a heretic. He followed this up in July with an assault on the castle and the killing of the loyalist Archbishop Allen.

These events would appear to have marked the point of no return for the FitzGeralds. Yet, remarkably, they may not have been intended as such. Given that the dynasty was adept at brinkmanship and that this strategy had worked well in the past, it may have been that the aim of the exercise was simply to pile more pressure on Henry to end his and Thomas Cromwell’s meddling in Irish affairs. Silken Thomas, after all, was merely following his father’s orders by whipping up a measure of chaos in order to bring Henry to heel: anarchy in Ireland was expensive, and the FitzGeralds were the one force in Ireland who had proved themselves able to bring disorder in the Pale to an end. Yet Thomas miscalculated: the king chose to treat the events in Ireland as outright rebellion. In London, Kildare was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, where he died in September; in Ireland, the FitzGerald stronghold at Maynooth, outside Dublin, was besieged and taken by Crown forces in March 1535. The castle’s defenders were put to death but Silken Thomas, his safety guaranteed, was dispatched to exile in London – where two years later he too was executed, along with his father’s five brothers; their remains were exhibited through the streets of the city. The Kildare hegemony was now, definitively, at an end.

Henry’s ruthless reaction had been guided by a vital and rapidly changing political scene, one that encompassed a world far beyond Ireland, yet involved Ireland intimately. The king needed to show that he was in control of his own policies and to demonstrate his resolve: if he backed down in Ireland, a good many factions in England would watch and learn from events. The Reformation, meanwhile, brought about by Henry’s complicated marital arrangements that had led to a permanent breach with Rome, had a particular Irish dimension: it was the catalyst for a slow rupture in the relationship between the Crown and the ‘degenerate’ Old English who had inhabited Ireland now for over three hundred years and who remained culturally secure in the Catholicism that Henry was now intent on sweeping away in England itself. For these families, there was an invidious choice: whether to remain with Rome and risk the wrath of the Crown, or to follow Henry in abandoning this age-old link for a new State religion. Faced with this dilemma, many of the colonists would come to resent their cultural link to England – not only because of their adherence to the old faith, but also the loss of the quasi-independence they had enjoyed in Ireland.

The Dublin administration was intent on demonstrating both its temporal and its ecclesiastical authority in Ireland. In the second half of the 1530s, for example, it embarked on a number of military operations throughout the country from south to north. These campaigns caused a good deal of disquiet in Gaelic Ireland, for Crown forces not only captured strongholds that had slipped from their hands but also probed deep into areas that had traditionally been safe Irish territory, including the marshy lowlands of what is now County Offaly and the rugged valleys of the Wick-low mountains. This new, purposeful policy of the State found its best expression at a meeting of the Irish parliament in June 1541, at which the lordship came to an end. Henry was formally declared King of Ireland – the first English monarch to assume the title – and the proclamation was followed by all manner of celebrations in Dublin. The move was of course a logical political step: Henry and his ancestors had held Ireland as a gift of the papacy; but in the light of the Reformation, such a status could not possibly be defended. He had to move swiftly, therefore, to change the country’s status and to declare it, not a gift of anyone (and of a pope least of all) but rather an inalienable possession.

At the same time, the State moved to mould the Church in its own image. To all intents and purposes, two Churches now began to coexist within Ireland: one within the bounds of the English colony and the other in the rest of the country. From 1539 the ancient monasteries began to vanish, one by one, as they had done in England; their lands were confiscated and granted to loyal followers of the Crown, and their material wealth was gathered into the State treasuries. By the end of the year they had almost gone from Leinster, their former inmates for the most part left to make a living as best they could. The cultural shock of these changes cannot be underestimated. Attachment to the old systems ran deep and, as in England, it would be no easy matter simply to jettison centuries of Catholicism in favour of the new arrangements. Whether or not the monasteries had been badly run and administered – and very many of them had been in steep decline for decades, the monks abusing their positions and privileges – they had nevertheless been fixtures in the land and in the lives of the communities who lived around them. Many of them had fulfilled important economic, educational and social functions, all of which now disappeared overnight; and the bitterness of the monks in the face of what they considered heresy was communicated rapidly among their former flock.

In addition, the iconoclasm that accompanied the Reformation was deeply shocking to the devout. Take the scene at Dublin in 1538, for example, when Archbishop George Browne (who had officiated at the wedding of Henry and Anne Boleyn) caused a bonfire to be lit in front of Christ Church: as the fire took hold, the cathedral’s ancient relics – including the Bachall Íosa, the crozier of Patrick – were brought out and dumped into the flames. At first, such dramatic statements of intent had little effect: the further from Dublin one went, the less influence the reformed Church exerted. The great majority of the clergy and laity in Ireland were unmoved by its agenda and this resistance inevitably took on a political hue: ‘The friars and priests of all the Irishry do preach that every man ought, for the salvation of his soul, [to] fight and make war against our sovereign lord the king’s majesty and if any of them die in the quarrel, his soul, that so shall be dead, shall go to heaven as the souls of SS Peter, Paul, and others, which suffered death for God’s sake.’
⁶

It may have been accepted in government circles that the battle for souls might take some time to win, but the military campaigns of the 1530s convinced many that the struggle for land and temporal authority could more easily be achieved. From July 1540, when Sir Anthony St Leger took the reins of authority in Ireland, there was a clear intent to bring a measure of order to as much of the island as possible. This was the beginning of the policy known as ‘surrender and regrant’, which was born out of the urgent need to settle matters once and for all. This might be done by a full-scale invasion – but, while one faction at court counselled an all-out assault, Henry was more inclined to listen to those pragmatists who formulated a means by which the island might be coaxed into submission without bankrupting the English state in the process.

Surrender and regrant meant that Gaelic chiefs would give up their lands and their political independence to the Crown. Title to these same lands would then be returned to them together with citizenship, English aristocratic titles and the protection of the law – all in return for loyalty, financial tribute in the form of rent, and an agreement to speak and dress in a way becoming to an English citizen. Surrender and regrant would therefore guarantee both peace in Ireland and at the same time a much-needed flow of revenue into the English exchequer. It was a practical solution but psychologically deft too, acknowledging for the first time the requirement that Gaelic lords be treated both as leaders of society in their own right and as people worthy of legal protection, rather than as outlaws almost by birth.

As such, the policy was highly symbolic. The Gaelic lords of Ireland now had the possibility of becoming part of the status quo, though at a price that would include the relinquishment of the existing Gaelic inheritance laws in favour of the English system of primogeniture. The system had some success in the 1540s: some thirty Gaelic Irish and Old English families, including the O’Donnells and O’Neills of far-flung and hitherto obdurately Gaelic Ulster, submitted formally to Henry. But the relationship between Catholicism and the new reformed faith remained in flux, the object of much cultural negotiation; the sharp and unbridgeable divisions between the two faiths would only later become apparent.

Surrender and regrant would remain a central plank of Tudor policy in the years to come. The reigns of Edward VI (1547–53) and Mary I (1553–8) saw English financial and military subventions stepped up in a bid to force the pace – but increased coercion would prove counterproductive, and the growing levels of violence served only to alienate the local settler populations. In particular, the experiment with limited plantation settlers in the lowlands of Leinster – initiated by Edward and continued by Mary – proved disastrously expensive, requiring large garrisons to repel the expropriated O’More and O’Connor clans after the establishment of their territories as Queen’s and King’s Counties. The Tudors pondered the experience: to what extent was it in English interests to move slowly towards an accommodation in Ireland, given that violence continued regardless? In religious terms, meanwhile, Mary’s passionate Catholicism naturally complicated matters, in Ireland as in England: it was reported that the citizens of Kilkenny marked her accession to the throne with overtly Catholic celebrations that would have raised both the rafters in the city and eyebrows in Dublin Castle: ‘They rang all the bells…they flung up their caps to the battlement of the great temple [St Canice’s Cathedral], with smiling and laughing most dissolutely…they brought forth their copes, candlesticks, holy water stock, cross, and censers. They mustered forth in general procession most gorgeously, all the town over, with
Sancta Maria
,
ora pro nobis
and the rest of the Latin litany.’
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But it would be in the course of the long reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) that the defining events would be played out, against the context of a continent now traumatized by religious upheaval.

Beyond Ireland’s shores the old Europe of feudal certainties was being rent asunder. The Reformation had induced panic in the Catholic monarchies of Europe, as well as bouts of savage retaliation: when, for example, tens of thousands of Protestant Huguenots across France were killed by Catholic mobs in 1572 in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a
Te Deum
to be celebrated. In England itself, the Reformation remained far from complete: Mary had caused hundreds of Protestants to be burned at the stake for refusing to return to the old faith; and when her half-sister succeeded to the throne in 1558, it was by no means certain which direction policy would take. The cautious and parsimonious Elizabeth was at heart a pragmatist. She was certainly not a fervently committed Protestant in the way that Mary had been a zealous Catholic, and it seems clear that she fulfilled her Protestant destiny for sound practical reasons – as the best means of preserving her throne in a dangerous political world. As the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – the wife who replaced the devouity Catholic Catherine of Aragon after Henry divorced her – and as head of the reformed Church in England, however, Elizabeth became increasingly the focus of the hostility of Catholic Europe in general and of Spain in particular. The stakes were immeasurably higher than they had ever been for her father.

In 1569, as a Catholic rebellion was brewing in northern England, an Old English revolt erupted in Ireland – partly as a result of the central government’s political mismanagement of the situation. It had been the wish of Elizabeth’s ministers to install English-born (and therefore politically loyal) colonists, traders and middlemen at strategic points throughout the province of Munster – in the more important coastal ports, for example, where they could be given trading privileges. Their aim was to enable centralized English power to flow unimpeded throughout the region. Although many minor members of the province’s gentry looked forward to this new economic order, Munster society as a whole remained obdurate. For one thing, its circle of Old English families continued to control economic and political life; and a network of local alliances between these families and Gaelic power in the region further consolidated its inaccessibility to outside influence. Breaking these local power bases, then, was a principal government objective, and it was towards this end that the Earl of Desmond had been summoned to court in 1567. His absence – so the thinking went – would deprive Munster politics of a key leadership figure: the actual effect, however, was to produce a vacuum filled, two years later, by rebellion.