The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The King was constituted 'the only Supreme Head in earth of the whole Church of Ireland', and granted special jurisdiction over the Irish religious communities. 1537 saw the dissolution of a few of them. Their own spiritual malaise and morbidity, their virtual ruination and abandonment were reasons for their demise. So, too, was the evidence that some of the religious had, in their support for the Geraldine rebels, revealed their higher loyalty to local lords than to their king. The attainder of Kildare and his adherents, and the confiscation of Geraldine and monastic lands allowed the Crown to boost its revenues and to distribute patronage. Sir Patrick Finglas, the Anglo-Irish Chief Justice of the King's Bench, had proposed a scheme in c. 1534 to 'plant young lords and gents out of England' in dissolved monastic possessions in the turbulent borderlands south of Dublin. His moderate scheme was not implemented, but it was the forerunner of increasingly aggressive proposals for the settlement and plantation of people. Many who pondered how Ireland might be reformed - and who had read their Roman history - came to believe that the establishment of plantations or colonies would have the strategic and moral imperative of advancing English law and custom, and of reminding the Irish lords of their altered obligations in the new Irish Kingdom. With plantation would come a new breed of English in Ireland; migrants not born in ireland, who came to settle, to plant, and to exploit it - the New English.
The replacement of the pope by the king of England as Head of the Church at first met little resistance. That quiescence was temporary. The Friars Observants ('Friars obstinates') offered a campaign of passive resistance. The final surrender of religious houses in the Crown territories took place between the summer of 1539 and the summer of 1540. This followed an assault in the winter of 1538-9 upon images, shrines, places of pilgrimage and of popular devotion. The annalist of Loch Cé lamented that 'there was not a holy cross, a statue of the Virgin, nor a venerable image within their [the Crown's] jurisdiction that they did not destroy'. An air of apocalyptic forboding pervaded the Pale. But in the territories of the Gaelic lords - in Munster, Connacht and Ulster - the suppression campaigns did not advance. The friars maintained their traditional ways with impunity, 'using the old popish sort'. Later, the very association of Reformation with the English monarch became an added reason to oppose it. The campaign for suppression coincided with a revolt of Irish lords of unprecedented menace. Their cause could easily be identified with the threat to the old religion, and a Gaelic revolt with political ends could be presented as religious crusade. The failure of the Geraldine rebellion had left the old system of dynastic alliances in disarray, but not destroyed. The lords were never so fearful, never so individually vulnerable, but their local power was intact, and together they constituted so formidable a force that no Tudor army could easily suppress them. Great Gaelic lords like O'Reilly, O'Neill and O'Donnell could field more horsemen than the king's chief governor. With the old alliances disrupted, the lords were volatile and dangerous as they waited to exploit the opportunities offered by the Geraldine desolation, and made novel alliances with former enemies. They would not easily submit to Tudor overlordship. MacCarthy Reagh defied the Crown: 'What he has won with his sword, he will hold with his sword'. In Ulster, O'Neill and his underlords remained hostile, and the new O'Donnell, Manus, was as extravagant in his claims as in his talents. The septs of Leinster - the O'Connors, O'Mores and Kavanaghs - waited their moment to prey upon the Pale. In Connacht the Mayo Burkes, the O'Connors of Sligo and the O'Malleys held out, still unsubdued. In the western lordship of Thomond in Munster the O'Briens gave sanctuary to Geraldine refugees. A band of Geraldine followers, bound by 'kindred, marriage and fostering', longed 'more to see a Geraldine to triumph than to see God come amongst them'. The hopes of all those 'branded at the heart with a G' rested with Lord Offaly's half-brother, 'Young Gerald'. He had been spirited to the west of Ireland by his aunt, Lady Eleanor MacCarthy who, now married to Manus O'Donnell, hoped to ally the great Gaelic lords of the north with those of Munster and to restore the Geraldines.
Into this unstable world came Lord Leonard Grey, madde chief governor in 1536. Through the following three years he campaigned relentlessly against the Irishry, though with forces so mutinous that he feared them more than he did the Irish. As he turned to conciliate where he could not conquer, he was accused of confederacy with the Irish, of restoring the Geraldine band, with himself at its head. His enemies claimed that he held 'secret intelligences' by night with the Irishry; O'Connor of Offaly, the scourge of the Pale, was 'his right hand, and who but he?'; the O'Neill was his godson; O'More's sons were his 'chief darlings'; 'my Lord Deputy is the Earl of Kildare newly born again'. These charges came from the Earl of Ormond and his followers, whose own hopes to inherit the Geraldine ascendancy were thwarted as the governors of the coloony feared and guarded against another overmighty lord. Grey became dangerously entangled in the old rivalries as he supported the Butlers' traditional enemies against them. But his strategy of offering protection to those lords who would submit to the Crown, and inflicting retribution on those who would not, might have worked had he been less restless and aggressive.
Now, in retaliation, a novel alliance had formed in this shifting world which was more alarming than any yet. In the late summer of 1539 the War of the Geraldine League broke out. O'Neill and O'Donnell with their Ulster underlords swept down through Louth and Meath, aiming for Tara, where O'Neill intended to be inaugrated high king of Ireland. The Geraldine League confronted the Crown with new dangers: a united Gaelic resistance in the name of the old religion and the papacy, with the prospect of aid from France and Scotland. Friars and priests denounced Henry VIII as 'the most heretic and worst man in the world' and promised the rebels that they would go to heaven if they died in that cause. 'Mortal enemies' - O'Connor of Sligo and O'Donnell; O'Donnell and O'Neill - were now sworn one to another. O'Brien would not make a truce with Ormond, for O'Neill, O'Connor and the O'Tooles were 'his Irishmen whom he intendeth to defend'. The League survived into 1540, despite its defeat at Bellahoe on the Ulster border, and was overcome not by Tudor military power, but by the diplomacy and patronage of Sir Anthony St Leger. Lord Leonard Grey fell in the summer of 1540, a victim of the coup at the English court which brought down Cromwell: St Leger, a client of the Duke of Norfolk, arrived in the autumn to replace him. Young Gerald, 'the traitor boy', fled to France, and Geraldine hopes with him. Conquest by the English Crown through a policy of grants to great Anglo-Irish lords to enable them to win mastery of the island had, over three centuries, failed; conquest by military occupation must fail through lack of resources; conquest by conciliation was the way now devised. In the Parliament held in Dublin in June 1541 Henry VIII was declared, not Lord, but King of Ireland. This was a constitutional change of the greatest consequence. Ireland now had a king who had never been acclaimed, nor anointed, nor ever bound by coronation oath to uphold the shaky liberties of his Irish subjects. The king of Ireland never existed separately from the king of England, and where the interests of the two kingdoms clashed, it would always be those of the king of England which prevailed. The Irish Parliament and the Irish Privy Council, too, were subordinate to their English counterparts. Ireland was now a kingdom, but it was not an independent sovereign entity. Its own king never visited it; distrusted it; found its ways alien; and denied its autonomy.
Ireland was no longer to be a land of many lordships, but of one. The Act for the Kingly Title provided the statuatory basis for the exercise of the King's jurisdiction in the sovereign Gaelic lordships. The King must make his authority real: his religion, his law, his taxes must be imposed. Any resistance would now be rebellion by subjects, rather than opposition from Irish enemies. Distinctions between the King's English subjects in Ireland and his former Irish enemies were dissolved. Now both were subject to the same laws, and under his protection if they obeyed them. St Leger proceeded by negotiation and conciliation in an attempt to win over the Gaelic chiefs and to unite the disparate political communities of Ireland in submission and loyalty to the English Crown. His success in overcoming the Gaelic lords' suspicion of the King's ambitions for the wealth of their territories was, in the circumstances, considerable. Yet the fate of the suppression campaign was instructive. In the Gaelic territories, the dissolution of the religious houses was a matter for negotiation between St Leger and the lords, and here although ownership may have been transferred from ecclesiastical to secular lords, very many of the houses survived, with the religious still in possession.
Under St Leger there began a policy towards the great chiefs of the Irishry which would last the century. They were to submit themselves to the King, surrendering their own sovereign jurisdiction and lands in their territories, their use of the clan name as a title, to be regranted in return feudal title and feudal tenure under letters patent. Gaelic lordship was to be trandformed to feudal lordship; the Gaelic tenurial system replaced by an English one. Now the Irish lords were to hold land freely by law, no longer by the sword, with their lands passing, by primogeniture, to their heirs. But the English legislators confused lordship of a territory with its ownership, and granted lands as property to the lord in a way unknown to Irish law and custom. In Gaelic Ireland the land was the sept's not the lord's. The clans were now dispossessed not only of the right to elect and be elected, as primogeniture replaced tanistry, but also of land. No wholesale confiscation followed, but some lords gained at the expense of their underlords. The English hoped that primogeniture would prevail in time, but tanistry was not easy to outlaw. The submission of one lord might bind his successors, or his sept, for the lord was subordinate to a Gaelic system which had elected him, and septs which had not always remained loyal to a tanist were even less likely to accept a chief dictated by birth alone, or to allow designation of an heir by the lord. Of gravest consequence was Conn O'Neill's choice of Matthew as heir and Baron of Dungannon, instead of his son, Shane, the clan-elected tanist. Matthew had the legitimacy of royal approval, but had no standing among the O'Neills, and was eventually murdered in 1558 in a clash with Shane's supporters. Shane's accession to power in Tyrone and Ulster was seen by the English as usurpation, a dangerous derogation of the new principle of inheritance, which must be protected to save the royal honour. Yet with many lords the policy submitted. They surrendered lands and the name; they promised to ride in hostings against the King's enemies, and in return they would be defended. Resolving to submit to the Crown, they renounced the pope also, seemingly without scruple. That they were delegated jurisdiction over benefices in their territories helped to persuade them. The greater lords - like O'Neill, Clanrickard Burke and O'Brien - swore fealty to the Crown and received earldoms, becoming Earl of Tyrone, Earl of Clanrickard, Earl of Thomond. Lesser lords received lesser titles. Why did they submit, these lords who had previously ignored or defied the English king? Why did they, who had so recently vowed that 'they will have all or lose all', now surrender? Some succumbed to force, like O'Neill, after devastating rodes (incursions) through Tyrone, and this lord's submission was instructive to all the others. Underlords looked for freedom from the dominance of their overlords, like the MacCarthys of Muskerry, released from MacCarthy Mór. Others, vulnerable and fearing future deprivation, conceded. The lords saw the instability of the old factionalism, feared the militarism of the Lord Deputy and understood how evanescent were the promised of foreign princes. Agreement with the King brought them defence of their property and the possibility of disarmament. The prospect of advancing one heir instead of 'twenty bastards' might appeal, so one jaundiced official thought. Perhaps few believed that their submission was permanent. The obedience of the Gaelic lords was only ever conditional and pragmatic, never the absolute loyalty of the subject. Though Conn O'Neill agreed 'utterly to forsake' the name of O'Neill, believing that he could be at once an Irish noble, the Earl of Tyrone, owing fealty to a king in England, and a Gaelic lord who had once thought of the high kingship, his successors would renounce the earldom and the fealty and long to be O'Neill once more, to go to the stone at Tullaghoge and receive the name. By the late sixteenth century the 'stone' and the 'name' came to be resonant with rebellion. 'The traitors,' Sir Henry Bagenal wrote darkly of Hugh O'Neill in 1595, 'is gone to the stone to receive that name.'