Catastrophic Dimensions

This essay's intent is to assess the relationship between the anti-Catholic legislation passed by the Irish parliament of 1613-1615 and the emergence of a distinct national identity in early modern Ireland. For almost four centuries, the royal administration in Ireland had distinguished between the Gaelic Irish populations in the hinterlands of Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster, and the English population in the Pale, that relatively urbanized settlement centered on Dublin, and in the outlying towns and earldoms of Leinster and Munster. The parliament of 1613-1615 gave legal force to a new, equally impermeable cleavage between the two components of the Anglo-Irish(1) colonial community: the Old and New English. The New English were recent Protestant transplants, sent from England by the crown during the sixteenth century to operate the Irish government. The Catholic Old English were natives of Ireland. Descendants of the original twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquerors, the Old English shared an Anglo-Irish heritage and the common interests shaped by that heritage.(2) By securing the rigorous enforcement of the Oath of Supremacy, the implementation of revenue-generating recusancy fines, the expulsion of all Jesuits and seminary priests from Ireland, and the confiscation of Catholic lands during the parliament of 1613-1615, the New English government systematically excluded the Catholic Old English from political and social influence on the grounds of religion.(3) The interpretation of the Irish government's shift from racial to religious discrimination raises profound historiographical questions, for the attempt to locate this shift in a framework of cause and effect requires the historian to confront the problematic concept of Irish nationalism. This task has provoked significant debate among historians of early modern Ireland.

R. F. Foster has interpreted the Irish government's new emphasis on religious discrimination as a primary cause of the emergence of a distinct Old English identity in seventeenth-century Ireland. The anti-Catholic thrust of the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has suggested, was incidental to the government's more significant attempt to secure English interests in the turmoil wrought by the failed rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, the renegade earl of Tyrone. "The real priority of government," Foster has argued, "was to reorganize representation, incorporate new boroughs and Protestantize the personnel of parliament. This produced a decisive, if dependent, Protestant majority in the 1613 parliament, ranged against a largely Old English minority."(4) The Irish government thus pursued strategies of Anglicization and Protestantization not as punitive or exclusionary measures but rather as matters of internal regulation; these strategies, intended to rein in particularistic, myopic, local interests, bore no nationalistic implications.(5) That "version of Irishness" cultivated by the Protestant New English settlers in the Irish administration most effectively conduced to the governance of Ireland "with English priorities and in English interests."(6) Policies intended to stabilize, however, soon gave rise to instability; the aggrandizement of Protestant New English interests stirred resentment in the Catholic Old English community. "[T]hese developments in politics," Foster has suggested, "coupled with the threat to land titles and the effects of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, completed the politicization of the Old English, the phrase now applied universally to those 'English of Irish birth.'"(7) The anti-Catholic legislation passed by the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has argued, responded to no single threat to the interests of the crown in Ireland but rather to a political situation fragmented by local competition and dissent in both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish communities. Protestantization and Anglicization simply provided the administration with the means to regularize the enforcement of English law and to elevate governance above local rivalries. The consequential exclusion of the Old English from political and social influence, Foster has argued, did not represent a chapter in what Steven G. Ellis calls "the dominant Whig-nationalist tradition of Irish historiography--an independent Irish nation ever emerging but always frustrated by English interference."(8)

While Foster has perceptively escaped the distorting influences of this "whig-Nationalist tradition" of Irish historiography in his interpretation of the policies of the 1613-1615 Irish parliament that denied the political and social legitimacy of the Old English community, he has also neglected the nuances of the Irish national identity that emerged from the turbulent interaction of the Old and New English communities in the Tudor period and motivated those policies. During the sixteenth century, the attempt by the Old English to exercise the rights enjoyed by English subjects to comprehensive and effective local governance ran counter to the crown's impulse to protect royal interests at minimal cost. Both groups demanded the governance of Ireland "with English priorities and in English interests,"(9) but each group understood those concepts differently. Political competition between the Old English community and the royal administration, filled increasingly by Protestant New English officials, gave rise to an ideological conflict over the meaning of Englishness and the relationship of the Old English identity to it. The Old English occupied an ambiguous position in Tudor Anglo-Irish society: Catholic but loyal to the crown, committed to principles of English governance in a distinctly Irish political context, they were neither fully English nor fully Irish but rather an amalgam of the two. The Old English raised legitimate opposition to adverse crown policies on the basis of their membership in an overarching English identity. As the crown administration's frustration with this opposition grew, political conflict quickly assumed nationalistic implications. By emphasizing the growing divergence between the interests of the crown and the demands of the Old English community, New English officials and commentators transformed competition within a national identity into competition between national identities. The shift in emphasis from racial to religious discrimination, ratified by the 1613-1615 parliament but emergent well before then, allowed the New English administration to deny the Old English community its place in an overarching English identity. Race had linked the Old English and the New English, but religion linked the Old English undeniably to the Gaelic Irish. The rift that the Irish government established within the colonial community laid the foundations for the type of militant Irish nationalism that, in its aggressive opposition to English rule, expanded and augmented the tragic, catastrophic dimension of Irish experience. In their political action during the sixteenth century, the Old English shaped an integrated national identity that, though markedly distinct from the English identity cultivated by the royal administration, reconciled English principles with Anglo-Irish priorities. The militant and exclusionary response of the New English community, in turn, opened a chasm between Englishness and Irishness that the Old English had sought to close.

The crisis of Irish governance in 1534 set in motion the political and ideological conflicts that culminated in this rupture in the early seventeenth century. The eruption, and swift suppression, of the first significant opposition to the English administration emphasized both the instability of the medieval Irish lordship, divided between English and Gaelic Irish spheres of influence, and the precarious position of the English within their own sphere. In an attempt to have his father, the ninth Earl of Kildare, restored to his traditional office as Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Lord Offaly and the Old English Fitzgeralds of Kildare had raised a "protest within the context of loyalty to the crown."(10) Lord Offaly intended, through his resistance, to emphasize to Henry VIII the importance of the Kildare line for the stable governance of Ireland, but the political context of the period transformed resistance couched in loyalty into outright rebellion in the eyes of the king. The Fitzgerald rebellion coincided with Henry's defiance of both pope and emperor and with Thomas Cromwell's construction of a new national church; the king, unwilling to countenance militant unrest in his Irish lordship, dispatched Sir William Skeffington with 2,300 soldiers to crush the rebellion and to restore order.(11) The defeat of the Kildare rebellion and the collapse of the stabilizing influence of Fitzgerald hegemony in Ireland forced the royal administration to confront disquieting new circumstances. The fall of the Fitzgeralds left a vacuum of power "in geographical, political, and social terms."(12) The reversion of the Kildare lands to the crown set the Pale at risk for invasion by the Gaelic Irish on its borders, and the administration soon recognized the necessity of a royal garrison to replace the disbanded Kildare retinues. The Fitzgerald rebellion indicated to the king the dangers of delegating executive power to Old English feudal lords, the traditional mode of governance in Ireland, and emphasized the increasing need for bureaucratic government, controlled from London, that would exercise broad jurisdiction to maintain stability. Indeed, the collapse of the Kildare earldom and the fall of the Fitzgeralds suggested the urgency of thoroughgoing reform in the Tudor Irish government.

In this respect, the collapse of Fitzgerald hegemony in Ireland was a blessing in disguise, for it provided an opportunity to realize the Old English demands for political reform that had developed during the first three decades of the sixteenth century. Brendan Bradshaw has called attention to a burgeoning movement for comprehensive political reform indigenous to the Old English Pale community.(13) The Old English demanded, in short, the full actualization of the king's claim to Ireland; they sought vigorous local governance and a commitment by the crown to enforce English laws, to defend the Pale, and to expand jurisdiction over the Gaelic regions. This reform movement addressed the crown's governance of Ireland and its failure to provide for the general security of Old English interests. "[T]he crown's involvement in Irish government for the first twenty years or so of [the reign of Henry VIII] suggests an attitude fluctuating between apathy and feeble interest."(14) The political reform movement of the early sixteenth century played out under the control of both the government and the Old English community. The socio-economic structure of the Pale, geared toward stable colonial life, invested the Old English with a strong commitment to peace. Their tradition of participation in local government and their loyalty to the crown motivated their attempt to secure peace and stability through traditional political processes. Bradshaw identified both conservative and liberal impulses in the Old English reform movement, but he nonetheless found similarities in their general approach to conditions inside and outside the Pale.(15) The Old English community of the Pale demanded a strengthening of the governmental apparatus, an improvement in the Pale's military defenses, the reduction of the power of local Old English feudal magnates, and sustained and efficient royal governance in Ireland.(16) The Old English also demanded improved relations between the Pale community and the Gaelic Irish, the expansion of royal governance throughout Ireland, and the eventual assimilation of the Gaelic Irish communities under crown rule. Though the Old English reformers disagreed slightly on their time frame and their specific method of reform, they envisaged, by and large, the gradual expansion of English authority in Ireland on an increasingly national scale.(17) They sought an Irish government that would govern all of Ireland.

A treatise written by Sir Patrick Finglas, Chief Baron of the Exchequer after 1520 and a prominent member of the Old English community in the Pale, reflects the central themes of the Old English reform movement. In "A Breviat of the getting of Ireland, and of the Decaie of the Same," Finglas, employing a historical framework to emphasize the imperative need for political reform, related the "decaie" of the Anglo-Irish community to governmental neglect. The medieval lords and governors of Ireland, "haveing grete Possessions in England of their owne, regarded little the defence of their Londs in Irland; but took the Profitts of the same for a while, as they culd, and some of them never saw Irland."(18) This neglect, Finglas suggested, allowed the Old English feudal lords to aggrandize themselves by imposing Gaelic law along the borders of the Pale.

Nevir sithence did the Gerraldines of Mounster, the Butlers, ne Geraldines of Leinster obediently obey the Kyng's Lawes in Irlaund; but continually allied themselves with Irishmen using continually Coyne and Livery,(19) whereby all the Londe is now of Irish rule, except the little English Pale, within the Counties of` Dublyn and Meath and Uriell.(20)

Finglas revealed none of the anti-Gaelic sentiment that would characterize later Old English treatises; he criticized the inability of the ineffectual royal Irish government to suppress Gaelic law, not the degenerative influence of Gaelic culture. In a striking passage, he unfavorably compared the failure of the administration to maintain English law with the assiduous commitment of the Gaelic Irish to their traditional Brehon laws.

It is a gret Abusion and Reproach, that the Laws and Statutes made in this Lond are not observed ne kept after the making of them eight Days, which matter is oone of the Distructions of Englishmen of this Lond; and divers Irishmen doth observe and kepe souche Laws and Statuts which they make upon Hills in ther Country firm and stable, without breaking them for any Favour or Reward.(21)

Finglas' proposal for political reform involved the expansion of royal power within the Pale as a prelude to the reformation of the Irish lordship as a whole. "Furste, our Souveraigne Lorde the Kyng shuld extend his gracious power, for the Reformacion of Leinster which is the Key and highwaye for the Reformacion of the Remanent."(22) The political reform of Ireland, however, ultimately required the Irish government to enforce English law uniformly throughout Ireland.

[W]hensoever our Souveraigne Lord shall extend the Reformacion of Irlaund, he must Reduce the Lordes and Gentilmen of this Londe whych be of English Nacion to due Obedience of his Grace's Lawes, which is very harde to doe, unless the Kyng with an Army represse Irishmen upon the Borders, to contribute in a good conforming.(23)

Finglas and the other Old English reformers demanded, and expected, the reformation of the Irish government to proceed on their terms. They sought efficient, centralized English governance sensitive to their own interests. Only when the king acted on these interests would the English foothold in Ireland be secure.

The crown took little account of these Old English reform programs in framing the government that replaced the fallen Kildare administration. The crown responded to the Old English demands in only the most formal of ways. In the new Cromwellian administration (1534-1536), the Irish government gained a nominally expanded jurisdiction but lacked the manpower, financial resources, and commitment to enforce it. The new administration acted conservatively to fill the vacuum of power left by the collapse of Fitzgerald hegemony. The crown replaced the traditional governing mode of aristocratic delegation with a more centralized apparatus that included an English-born deputy, a standing garrison, and stronger control by the government in London. This new administration limited its reforms to the Englishry in Ireland; it attempted to create around the Pale a network of fortified garrisons similar to those defending the English settlement at Calais. Among the Irishry, the government attempted simply to secure and maintain traditional agreements with the Gaelic lords.(24) The Cromwellian administration thereby provoked bitter resentment in the Old English community. The suspension in 1536 of Poyning's Law(25) during the so-called Reformation Parliament undermined the executive function of the local Dublin administration; legislative initiative passed from it to Cromwell and the Council in London.(26) The frustration of the Old English over their exclusion from traditional legislative processes provoked "the first appearance of organized opposition to government policy which became so marked a feature of parliaments in early modern Ireland."(27) The succeeding Irish administration of Lord Leonard Grey (1536-1540) served only to exacerbate Old English dissatisfaction. The expansion of English jurisdiction to include the Irishry strained the resources of an already understaffed Dublin administration, and the regime threatened to deprive the Old English of the little influence that they had maintained in the government. "All Palesmen greatly resented the army of one thousand soldiers over whom they had no control," Nicholas Canny has explained. "[T]his left the Dublin government even more isolated than usual, since the army was resented even by those whom it was purporting to defend."(28) Thus, the outlines of future conflict emerged as crown and community pursued increasingly divergent goals for the government of Ireland. The Old English demanded a transformation of the Irish polity; the crown sought only to maintain the medieval lordship.

In the Irish parliament of 1541, the Old English struck preemptively to advance their program for reform against the crown's reluctance. Through the Act for the Kingly Title, which declared Ireland to be a sovereign kingdom under the rule of the English monarch, the Old English secured the comprehensive reform of the Irish administration for which Finglas and other reformers had called. The text of the Act reveals an attempt to bind the king to the enforcement of English laws in Ireland.

[L]ack of naming the king's majesty and his noble progenitors kings of Ireland, according to their said true and just title, style, and name therein, hath been great occasion that the Irishmen and inhabitants within this realm of Ireland have not been so obedient to the king's highness and his most noble progenitors, and to their laws, as they of right, and according to their allegiance and bounden duties ought to have been.(29)

This Act provided for the political unity of all inhabitants of Ireland, both Gaelic and English, under the unilateral jurisdiction of the crown and revealed an emergent impulse among the Old English to use the Irish parliament as their forum for political action within the new polity.(30) In repudiating the divided structure of the medieval lordship established in the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), the Act for the Kingly Title envisaged a single Irish community under the rule of the king, and it committed the crown's energies to making this single community a reality.(31) The parliament of 1541, which included members of both the Irishry and the Englishry, acted for the first time as an instrument of national governance. By emphasizing their position as loyal subjects, the Old English constitutionally prevented the government from neglecting their interests. By transforming Ireland into a sovereign kingdom under the crown, the Old English gave constitutional legitimacy to their version of Englishness.(32) The implications of the Act for the relationship between crown and community were vast. "A local reform group lobbying for royal initiative to impose order throughout the island," Steven Ellis explained, "had finally succeeded in committing the crown to just that, despite rebuffs in 1494, 1520 and the mid-1530s."(33) What the Old English had not accomplished through persuasion and argument they achieved through constitutional manipulation. In emphasizing Henry's kingly duty towards his subjects in Ireland, they bound the crown to political reform on Old English terms. Kingly duty would become "a much-used weapon in the armoury of persuasives" on which the Old English would rely as conflict with the colonial administration escalated.(34)

Reactions to the passage of the Act for the Kingly Title in Dublin and in London revealed that both the Old English community and the crown recognized its implications for the dynamics of Irish politics. On 18 June 1541, a public holiday and a general amnesty for prisoners were proclaimed in Dublin as the Act for the Kingly Title was promulgated at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Two thousand Dubliners celebrated High Mass and Te Deum, and cannonades, bonfires, and free wine marked the transformation of Ireland from a medieval lordship into a sovereign kingdom.(35) The reaction in London differed substantially. "Not a cheer was raised at court,"(36) and the king's council handled the Act as matter of routine administration and statutory revision. The passage of the Act infuriated the irascible monarch who acquired the title. Henry VIII condemned it on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds. The Act's text, he charged, implied that his kingly title in Ireland proceeded from the election and common consent of the Irish parliament and not from the right of original conquest; the bestowal of the kingly title by the Irish parliament, he argued, would derogate that title which he already held.(37) Henry also understood the Act's practical implications. He rebuked his council for devising "by an act, to invest in us the name and title of king of Ireland" when royal revenues were not "sufficient to maintain the state of the same."(38) Nevertheless, Henry could not refuse his new duties. The Old English, it seemed, had succeeded in binding him to protect and to advance their interests.

The statutory transformation of Ireland into a pan-insular kingdom, however, did not bring about this unity in practice. The attempt to implement the constitutional framework designed by the Act for the Kingly Title again raised tensions between the Old English desires for vigorous government and the crown's impulse to reduce costs. Conciliatory measures designed to bring the Gaelic Irish under English rule showed most clearly the practical short-comings of the new constitutional system. Surrender and re-grant, by which English property laws replaced traditional Gaelic methods of land tenure, provoked substantial Gaelic resentment to the expansion of English jurisdiction.(39) Henry's emphasis on economy in government initially kept these tensions to a minimum, but the attempt by the regime of Edward VI to impose a Protestant religious settlement and to deal aggressively with Gaelic Ireland gave rise to open conflict.(40) In Ulster, the imposition of English laws of primogeniture sparked a violent dispute between the sons of Con Bacagh O'Neill: Shane, who held the right of succession by Gaelic law, and Matthew, the firstborn who acquired this right by primogeniture. The intervention of the Tudor administration to enforce English law and to protect Matthew's "legal" inheritance provoked Shane to launch an attack on the Pale. This, indeed, was the typical result of surrender and re-grant; the imposition of English property laws met with limited success only in the Gaelic regions of the western earldoms of Clanricard and Thomond.(41) In the context of increasing unrest, two impulses converged to motivate the crown to revise its strategies of Irish government. First, the rebellions of the O'Neills in Ulster and of the O'Connors and the O'Mores in the midlands led the Dublin administration to focus its resources and energies on the reduction of border threats to the English Pale; colonial officials recognized the tenuous position of an English settlement surrounded by an increasingly hostile Gaelic Irish population.(42) Secondly, the emergence of Irish patronage as a significant prize in court politics motivated leading courtiers to press for a military suppression of and expansion into Ireland. During the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I, these courtiers entrenched themselves in the Dublin administration and shaped an increasingly militant approach to Irish governance.(43)

Between 1547 and 1565, these two impulses shaped a program for the military conquest of Ireland. Events at the beginning of Edward's reign suggested the form that this policy would assume. Gaelic