I

The Reformation had certainly failed in Ireland before the end of Elizabeth's reign, even in Dublin and the Pale surrounding it, that part of Ireland most completely under English authority. William Fitzwilliam, the viceroy, and Adam Loftus, the Elizabethan archbishop of Dublin, reported in a letter of February 1590 that in Dublin ‘there are now almost none other [than recusants]. The mayor, perhaps for duty, and some few with him for fashion's sake, will come to the ordinary Sunday sermon but none other man or woman’.Footnote ² A state paper of December 1600 declared that not more than twenty Irish-born householders in Dublin attended Protestant church services, and of them not more than four would receive communion.Footnote ³ In a letter of May 1590 Archbishop Loftus and two other senior English officials in Ireland responded to queries from the English privy council about recusants by stating that ‘we assure your lordships that there be very few that be otherwise … And, touching recusants, we conceive that most of the Pale do glory to be so accounted’.Footnote ⁴ John Long, the Elizabethan archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, wrote in July 1585 that ‘It is a hard thing to be thought of that the land [of Ireland] is not able to afford, of the birth of the land, forty Christians which have the taste of the true service of God.’Footnote ⁵ In July 1600 an Irish Protestant reckoned that there were hardly 120 Irish-born Protestants in all of Ireland.Footnote ⁶ The evidence of contemporaries indicates that Elizabeth's Reformation failed in Ireland absolutely and comprehensively.

II

The endorsement of the Elizabethan religious settlement by the Irish parliament within the remarkably short space of three weeks in January 1560 might seem to have augured well for the prospects of a Reformation breakthrough in Ireland.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, the enactment of the ecclesiastical bills did not reflect any enthusiasm for Protestantism: the quirky compromise endorsed by the 1560 parliament, authorising the use of a Latin version of the Book of Common Prayer for most of the country, reflected an anxiety on the part of the local elites to reconcile the conflicting claims on their loyalties of the queen and their Catholic religion. None the less, the speedy passage of the ecclesiastical bills shows that the Counter-Reformation was not yet established in Ireland.Footnote ⁸

On the other hand, the lack of support for the Elizabethan Reformation in Ireland became very clear very quickly. The ink on the parliamentary statutes was hardly dry when two of the first three Irish bishops to be tendered the Oath of Supremacy after the 1560 parliament, William Walsh of Meath and Thomas Leverous of Kildare, refused to subscribe and were removed from office.Footnote ⁹ Their deprivation had the effect of leaving three of the four dioceses of the Pale without bishops, since Armagh had already fallen vacant with the death of George Dowdall in November 1558.Footnote ¹⁰ It was not until August 1564, nearly six years after Elizabeth's accession, that the queen was able to find men to be bishops in each of the four dioceses of the Pale at the one time.Footnote ¹¹

After attempts were made to impose the Oath of Supremacy on the senior clergy of Dublin diocese a certificate was issued to the effect that its archbishop, the archdeacon of Dublin, the chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral and the precentor of St Patrick's had taken the oath, as well as a prebendary of Christ Church Cathedral, but it had been rejected by the chancellor, the treasurer and the precentor of Christ Church, and by one of the prebendaries.Footnote ¹² The certificate records that the oath was not tendered to the rest of the cathedral clergy in Christ Church, and it is not clear whether it was tendered to the remainder of the clergy in St Patrick's either. Only the dean of Christ Church is known to have sworn the oath later in 1560.Footnote ¹³ It seems that, having had the oath refused by so many senior clergymen in Dublin, the commissioners decided not to insist on a universal subscription lest Dublin be left bereft of clergy.

The Oath of Supremacy is known to have been tendered to only one clergyman in Meath diocese (other than the bishop who had already been deprived for rejecting it) and he too rejected it.Footnote ¹⁴ There are no records of commissions being established to take the oath from clergymen in Armagh or Kildare dioceses, let alone from clergymen beyond the Pale at that time. The circumspection of the crown officials in tendering the oath to the Irish clergy, by contrast with their English counterparts, reflects the very strong hostility that they encountered and the lack of clergymen available to replace any who were deprived. Strong opposition from the Irish clergy had, in fact, been anticipated in the official Device for the alteration of religion because the ‘clergy there are so addicted to Rome’.Footnote ¹⁵

All of the senior English-born officials in Dublin subscribed to the oath, as did some of the most senior of the Irish-born officials.Footnote ¹⁶ However, there is no record to show what proportion of Irish officials subscribed to the oath. An attempt was made to impose the oath on local government officials in the Pale in 1560. Yet only one town official and three Justices of the Peace were recorded as having subscribed to the oath in County Kildare.Footnote ¹⁷ No record survives to show which officials (if any) elsewhere subscribed to the oath in 1560. The first mayor of Dublin known to have been tendered the oath refused to subscribe to it and was fined £200 for his recalcitrance. Colm Lennon, after an exhaustive study of Dublin's records, concluded that ‘Refusals of the oath of supremacy by municipal officials are not recorded for the reason that the oath was not tendered to them.’Footnote ¹⁸

When, in 1585, Deputy John Perrot tried to insist that Justices of the Peace and other law officials in the Pale take the oath under threat of proceedings in the Court of Castle Chamber, Walsingham, the queen's secretary, wrote to him to express grave concern about the discontent roused by the tendering of the oath and the employment of anti-Catholic legislation.Footnote ¹⁹ The queen wrote to Perrot personally to command him to desist, ‘especially in matter of oath and religion, which was charged you not to meddle in … I marvel you lack so much discretion in these dangerous days to touch that point of religion’.Footnote ²⁰

The inability of the English crown to insist that the Oath of Supremacy be sworn by the secular or ecclesiastical elites had obvious implications for the enforcement of religious change. Bishop Brady, in a letter in March 1564, complained that the local law enforcement officials ‘are not only sworn enemies of the truth but also for lack of due execution of the law the out-throwers of the country’.Footnote ²¹ The queen's commissioners in March 1564 confirmed Brady's lament about the lack of enforcement of religious change.Footnote ²² Indeed, the scale of nonconformity was such that they decided that it was best to ‘meddle not with the simple multitude now at first, but with one or two boasting Mass men in every shire – that it may be seen that the punishment of such men is meant’. Yet in 1570 Brady still complained of the local officials that ‘So are they, for the most part, nay, I might say all, thwarters and hinderers of matters that should tend to the reformation of religion.’Footnote ²³

III

The popular response to the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer from the start was reflected in general non-attendance at Protestant services, and by the disruptive behaviour of many of those compelled to attend against their will. Lord Lieutenant Sussex complained that people ‘come to divine service as to a May game’.Footnote ²⁴ He observed that the dissent was so great that no commission would be sufficient to tackle it and he proposed that parliamentary legislation was needed to address it. Elizabeth authorised the establishment of the Irish Ecclesiastical High Commission in October 1564 specifically to tackle both those who ‘obstinately absent themselves from Church and divine service as by law established’ and those responsible for ‘any disturbance or misbehaviour committed or perpetrated in any church or chapel, or against divine service’.Footnote ²⁵ She directed the commissioners to ‘devise politic ways and means for the performance of this duty, and upon due proof to award such punishment, by fine or imprisonment, as to them shall seem expedient’.

In 1565 Adam Loftus surveyed the parishes of the Pale on behalf of the Irish Ecclesiastical Commission and found that, ‘by their own confessions’, the ‘greatest part’ of the nobility and other landholders of the Pale had ‘continually’ frequented the mass and other Catholic services since the Irish parliament of 1560, while ‘very few of them’ had ever attended a Protestant service or received communion according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote ²⁶ There were ‘many and great offences’ committed by the lower orders too. Loftus explained to the queen that the scale of nonconformity was such, particularly among the nobility and leading gentlemen who, he informed her, ‘condemned your majesty's most godly laws and proceedings more manifestly than the rest’, that ‘we shall never be able to correct them by the ordinary course of the statute’. That general manifestation of recusancy avant la lettre had no parallel in contemporary England; and it was possible because of the absence of law enforcement officials willing to impose religious change.

It is impossible to determine the effectiveness of the Ecclesiastical Commission in forcing people to attend Elizabethan Church services in Ireland because its register was destroyed in 1922 and few of its details have survived.Footnote ²⁷ James Murray tabulated the arrears of fines owed to the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1582. It seems a reasonable assumption that the geographical distribution of the arrears bore some relationship to the geographical spread of the fines levied. That being the case, two facts above all are striking: firstly, as late as 1582 the Commission largely confined its attentions to the Pale (only 7 per cent of the arrears were due from beyond the Pale), and secondly, Dublin city (which accounted for no less than 24 per cent of all the arrears in 1582) suffered disproportionately from the attentions of the Commission, as did the town of Drogheda (5 per cent).Footnote ²⁸

In a report dated 24 March 1574, David Wolfe sj noted that although ‘almost all’ of the citizens of Dublin were Catholics, ‘especially the natives of the city’, they went ‘perforce to the communion and sermons of the heretics’.Footnote ²⁹ The reference to native Dubliners points to the existence of a growing community of immigrant English in the Irish capital. The people of Drogheda, ‘all Catholics’ according to Wolfe, were also compelled to ‘hear the Koran of the heretics’. That shows that enforced attendance at Protestant services was general in the largest towns in the Pale in 1574. However, it is not clear whether such conformity extended to congregations in the smaller towns or rural parishes in which the bulk of the people lived, or among the propertied classes in the Pale. Wolfe declared that among the barons, lords and nobles of Meath, whom he claimed to know ‘not only personally’ but also ‘their very frame of mind’, he knew of no ‘heretic’ but one. That may not be very much of an exaggeration in the light of Loftus’ survey of 1565. In any case, the figures for Dublin and Drogheda may reflect the Ecclesiastical Commission's greater efforts to enforce conformity in the largest towns – or a not inconsiderable degree of persistent dissent in the towns.

Enforced attendance at Protestant services was patchy and intermittent. There was, however, ‘a substantial escalation in the level of the Commission's activity’ from 1577.Footnote ³⁰ Its operations were reinforced by a directive issued to the lords justice of Ireland in February 1579 to enforce the statutes compelling noblemen and gentlemen to go to church.Footnote ³¹ William Gerrard, the lord chancellor of Ireland and dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (though not a clergyman), had pews erected ‘for the nobility, for lawyers, for captains and all of the better sort, so as the citizens and all, being under his eye, never dare to be absent’.Footnote ³² That concerted drive brought about a result that Secretary Waterhouse declared in May 1579 was ‘that which I never hoped of, namely, that the whole inhabitants, being in effect all noted to be obstinate Papists in times past, do now all repair to the church and show themselves obedient in the substance of religion’.Footnote ³³ The patent novelty of that enforced conformity in Dublin is clear from Waterhouse's observation, but it is likely that the regular ritual of humiliation was more likely to alienate the local elites (‘all noted to be obstinate Papists’) than to win hearts and minds for Protestantism. In July 1580 Lord Justice Pelham astutely warned of ‘A settled hatred and a general contrariety in religion settled, saving in some few whose love to her majesty, favour of the court, or English education, or office or reputation here holds in all appearance of conformity with us.’Footnote ³⁴

Another manifestation of general dissent from Elizabeth's church establishment was the withdrawal of voluntary financial support for parish churches and chapels. Whereas the period immediately prior to the Reformation had witnessed a remarkable level of lay investment in church buildings and their accoutrements, from the earliest years of Elizabeth's reign there was a growing chorus of laments about ‘churches universally in ruin, and some wholly down’.Footnote ³⁵ Symptomatically, from the heart of Dublin one may cite St Werburgh's churchwarden accounts which record many generous gifts voluntarily bestowed upon the fabric of that church by its parishioners up to the eve of Henry viii's Reformation, but such gifts were no more in Elizabeth's reign and by 1605 St Werburgh's church was ‘now down and ruinous’.Footnote ³⁶ Another reflection of the withdrawal of lay support is the fact that the office of churchwarden, which appears to have been widespread throughout the Pale on the eve of Henry viii's Reformation, simply disappeared in the vast majority of parishes outside of the largest cities and towns.Footnote ³⁷

In June 1600 Elizabeth made the following observations on the state of the Elizabethan Church of Ireland in the Pale:

It seems axiomatic that in order for Elizabeth's Reformation to succeed in the Pale it needed preachers, but there was an incredible absence of Protestant preachers in Irish parishes throughout Elizabeth's reign.

IV

The first Protestant bishop appointed in Ireland in Elizabeth's reign was Alexander Craik, a Scotsman, who was promoted to Kildare on 21 August 1560.Footnote ³⁹ He fell ill on arriving in Ireland, and never fully recovered.Footnote ⁴⁰ He soon complained that he was in a diocese ‘where neither can I preach unto the people nor the people understand me’.Footnote ⁴¹ He pleaded repeatedly for preachers to be sent from England, in the absence of any Irish Protestant clergymen, but he never received a reply. He died sometime around August 1563 after a ministry that seems to have been absolutely fruitless.Footnote ⁴²

After the 1560 parliament the earl of Sussex, Elizabeth's viceroy, tried to get someone to become the archbishop of Armagh but ‘could get none’ until he nominated his own young English chaplain, Adam Loftus.Footnote ⁴³ Loftus was consecrated in March 1563, but four years later he confessed to Cecil ‘nor am I able to do any good in it for altogether it lies among the Irish’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1564 the queen's commissioners for Ireland informed her that the only Protestant preachers in all of Ireland were Loftus, Hugh Brady, the recently appointed bishop of Meath, and a vicar from Greenwich, ‘one Beard, a preacher who seems honest and preaches well’.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is quite remarkable that almost six years into her reign, Elizabeth's Reformation was being promoted by preaching among the approximately 2,500 parishes in Ireland by only two Protestant bishops and a cleric visiting briefly from London. For anyone trying to explain why the Reformation failed in Ireland the absence of Protestant preachers from the start of Elizabeth's reign must surely count as a significant factor.

The lack of preachers continued to stymie the progress of Elizabeth's Reformation in Ireland throughout her reign. In 1565 Sir Henry Sidney, immediately prior to his appointment as the queen's viceroy in Ireland, ventured his opinion that the only way to promote the Reformation was ‘by sending learned pastors from hence [England] and by giving them competent livings there [in Ireland]’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He saw no prospect of being able to recruit Irish Reformation pastors. Subsequent developments confirmed his pessimism and in 1576 he asked that a search be conducted in England's universities for anyone who could speak Irish and would willingly serve as a minister in Ireland or, if there were none or not enough, he suggested that the Scottish regent be approached to help remedy the deficiency.Footnote ⁴⁷ He hoped for ‘ten or twelve at the least’, a very modest request but one which reflected the sheer lack of preachers in Ireland almost eighteen years into Elizabeth's reign. Eight years later, in 1584, the prebendaries of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, declared that there was ‘not one in that land which can or will preach the Gospel, four bishops and the prebendaries of St Patrick's only excepted’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1587 Andrew Trollope informed Walsingham that in Ireland there were ‘not seven bishops able to preach’.Footnote ⁴⁹ An Irish Protestant in July 1600 declared that in all of Ireland there were still only twenty-four preachers, eight of whom were Irish-born and the rest English, of whom fourteen were English army chaplains.Footnote ⁵⁰ Without preachers the Elizabethan Church of Ireland could not mount a convincing challenge for the hearts and souls of people, even in the Pale.

The basic problem was the sheer absence of an Irish Protestant community from which Protestant clergymen could be recruited. That is not to argue that the failure of Elizabeth's Reformation was inevitable in Ireland. It is conceivable that the foundation of an Irish university early in Elizabeth's reign might have generated a body of Irish graduates from whom a native Protestant ministry might have been recruited. However, that raises the question of how such an institution could have been staffed with suitably-qualified Protestants at such an early date: none could be found in Ireland, and it proved strikingly difficult to find English Protestant clergymen of any high calibre who were willing to settle in Ireland.

In any case, physical access to a university ought not, by itself, to be considered a critical reason why the Reformation failed in Ireland. Archbishop Loftus, writing from Dublin in March 1585, pointed out that ‘Oxford and Cambridge are not far off’.Footnote ⁵¹ In fact, from the first years of Elizabeth's reign increasing numbers of Irish students were prepared to travel far to Catholic colleges on mainland Europe rather than attend England's universities.Footnote ⁵² It is arguable that the Elizabethan Church authorities could have done more to encourage young Irish men to study in English universities. Archbishop Bodkin of Tuam endowed a couple of clerical students from his diocese with the incomes of benefices to allow them to study in Dublin or England and it is possible that the three Connacht graduates who became Protestant bishops in the 1580s had had their studies sponsored by Bodkin or his colleague Bishop Burke of Clonfert.Footnote ⁵³ Thomas Lancaster, Elizabethan archbishop of Armagh, reckoned that a bursary of only £5 per annum would have sufficed to maintain an Irish student at an English university.Footnote ⁵⁴ On that reckoning the £500 dowries that Archbishop Loftus is alleged to have lavished on each of three of his daughters would have sufficed to maintain 100 students through three years of study at Oxford or Cambridge.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, there was no systematic investment made in clerical education or training in Ireland by the English crown or the Elizabethan church establishment. Instead Elizabeth's bishops in Ireland engaged in a frenzy of asset-stripping, simony and nepotism.Footnote ⁵⁶ The queen herself held most of the tithes of the Pale impropriate, but she leased them to the state's advantage rather than deploying them to the benefit of the Irish Church.Footnote ⁵⁷

The advocates of the Elizabethan Reformation failed to devise an effective strategy for incubating a Protestant ministry in Ireland. It seems that the fixation with the idea of an Irish university, despite the on-going problems of having one established and financed, distracted the reformers from considering alternative options, and ensured that in the absence of an Irish university, or of many Irish graduates from England's universities, there remained a severe dearth of preachers to promote the Elizabethan Reformation in Ireland throughout the later sixteenth century.

In the absence of Protestant clergymen the Elizabethan Church authorities had to retain priests who were Catholic by background, education, training and disposition but willing to conform outwardly to some degree or other in order to retain their benefices, or to appoint men of very variable quality. Lord Chancellor Weston, head of the Irish Ecclesiastical Commission, writing in April 1568, complained that the ‘parsons, vicars and curates, some of whom I examined, be so void of knowledge of God and his will that they know not his commandments’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In June 1566 Loftus, after three years as archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, complained that parishioners were ‘much fleeced and nothing at all fed’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In September 1571 Loftus complained again of the people being ‘sheep without a shepherd, without any doctrine and preaching of God's word’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Since these reports reflected poorly on the archbishop himself they are likely to be true. They are amply confirmed by his contemporaries.Footnote ⁶¹

Andrew Trollope, writing on 26 October 1587, recorded that there was ‘no divine service in the country[side], that all the churches in the country[side] are clean down, ruinous and in great decay, and in those in cities and in walled towns is overseldom any service said, and yet that negligently repaired unto’.Footnote ⁶² He cited the neglect of services in St Nicholas’ church in Dundalk, one of the greatest towns of the Pale, as a telling example. A great many parishes, he observed, were served by unbeneficed curates who ‘will not be accounted ministers but priests … And when they must of necessity go to church they carry with them a book in Latin of the Common Prayer set forth and allowed by her majesty, but they read little or nothing of it … but they tell the people a tale of Our Lady or St Patrick or some other saint’.Footnote ⁶³ The prebendaries of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, wrote that the number of unbeneficed curates in the Pale was ‘infinite’, that they subsisted on stipends of only £2 or £3 per annum and each was obliged to travel about ‘like a lackey to three or four churches in a morning, every church a mile or two asunder, and there once a week reads them only a Gospel in Latin, and so away’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Deputy Sidney reported that ‘All these live upon the bare altarages, as they term them (which, God knows, are very small) and were wont to live upon the gain of Masses, dirges, shrivings and such like trumpery godly abolished by your majesty.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Edmund Spencer in 1594 wrote that ‘They neither read scriptures, nor preach to the people, nor administer the communion, but baptism they do, for they christen after the Popish fashion, only they take the tithes and offerings.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Elizabeth herself, towards the end of her reign, stated that she had

For historians struggling to explain why the Reformation failed in Ireland the absence of Protestant preachers, and the employment of many clergy who simply read an extract from the Latin edition of the Book of Common Prayer or a Gospel in Latin for church services, must surely form a key component of their overall explanation. However, that does not mean that the provision of preachers would automatically have resulted in mass conversions to Protestantism. Barnaby Rich, writing in 1589, remarked that in Dublin and Drogheda, as well as in Waterford, ‘the word of God has been for many years most plentifully preached’ to no avail.Footnote ⁶⁸

V

The evidence of contemporaries shows that from the start of Elizabeth's reign Catholicism in the Pale was more resilient than its English counterpart, and more resistant to Protestantism. Analogies with passive ‘Church papistry’ are certainly mistaken. In 1566 Sir Henry Sidney, Elizabeth's viceroy, accounted for the slow progress of the Reformation in the Pale by reference to ‘the former errors and superstitions inveterated and leavened in the people's hearts’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Robert Daly, Elizabethan bishop of Kildare (1564–80), was confronted by ‘sturdy and proud Papists’ who resisted his efforts to promote the Reformation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hugh Brady, Elizabethan bishop of Meath (1563–84), repeatedly wrote of the opposition that he encountered in trying to promote the Reformation in the most extensive diocese of the Pale. Soon after his appointment in 1563 he lamented:

In May 1577 he wrote that ‘I find great boldness generally, as well by word as action, against the received religion. Masses be rife, little less than openly said, friars show themselves openly.’Footnote ⁷² As time passed he found that people were growing more defiant ‘in matters of papistry and lewd superstition’.Footnote ⁷³

Adam Loftus also complained of the strong resistance to Protestantism that he encountered. In 1574, after serving as an archbishop for eleven ‘troublesome’ years in Ireland, he asked to be translated to an English diocese rather than spend ‘the rest of my time … here amongst this stubborn and obstinate generation where men of far greater perfection than myself have long and vainly employed both doctrine and good examples’.Footnote ⁷⁴ On another occasion he complained that ‘this miserable realm [is] overwhelmed with idolatry’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1590, after three decades of ministry in the Pale, Loftus declared that ‘there has been in these people a general disposition to Popery, as a thing wherein they were nursled even from the cradle’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Barnaby Rich lamented that ‘the word of God’ was rejected because the people were ‘froward and obstinate’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The consistent testimony of these men, each of them a significant figure in the Elizabethan Reformation in the Pale, indicated that the people were ‘froward’, ‘obstinate’ and ‘stubborn’ in rejecting Protestantism in favour of ‘idolatry’, ‘superstition’, ‘popery’ and ‘papistry’, all of which were pejorative Protestant synonyms for Catholicism.

Colm Lennon found that in Dublin, at the heart of the Pale, there was strong continuity in the people's religious life throughout Elizabeth's reign. Catholic institutions, including chantries and religious confraternities, continued to function into the seventeenth century, and many traditional religious devotions remained very popular.Footnote ⁷⁸ The citizens supported nonconforming priests, either as chaplains or tutors, or as peripatetic pastors.Footnote ⁷⁹ Lennon argued that the parish clergy who conformed to the Elizabethan Church were an important ‘agency in maintaining a continuous pastoral service in the older mode’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Archbishop Loftus’ survey of 1565 revealed that the ‘greatest part’ of the landholders of the Pale had ‘continually’ attended the mass, while the lower orders were no better.Footnote ⁸¹ The will of Sir Thomas Cusack shows inter alia that churches in rural parishes in the Pale in 1571 were still decorated with the accoutrements of Catholic worship. Cusack himself left money for more of them to be purchased for a number of churches in his locality and he left money for memorial masses to be celebrated for his soul.Footnote ⁸² A Catholic loyalist from the Pale, in an open letter to his compatriots in 1600, took for granted that ‘none of us all … need … go a mile from his house for exercise of our religion’.Footnote ⁸³

Cumulatively, the evidence of popular resistance to Protestantism from the start of Elizabeth's reign – the non-subscription to the Oath of Supremacy, the widespread non-attendance at Protestant church services and the disruptive behaviour of many forced to attend against their will, the widespread withdrawal from the office of churchwarden, the withdrawal of voluntary contributions to local churches and chapels, the absence of local Protestant clergymen and the remarkable lack of conversions to Protestantism despite the considerable pressures put on people to conform over several years by the Irish Ecclesiastical High Commission in the Pale – is irrefutable. It contradicts the misconception that Elizabeth's Reformation failed only because of political factors in the latter part of her reign.Footnote ⁸⁴ None the less, religious dissent took on a political dimension in the context of the increasingly militarist governance of Elizabeth's régime in Ireland. Irish rebels invariably called for wider support on religious grounds as well as political, and recent work on the Baltinglass rebellion of 1580 and the Nine Years War of 1594–1603 shows that support on religious grounds was often forthcoming even from the Anglophone elites in the Pale.Footnote ⁸⁵ Tellingly, the elites of the Pale boycotted the official celebrations held in Ireland for England's safe deliverance from Catholic Spain's armada in 1588.Footnote ⁸⁶ The key point here is that Catholic dissent in Ireland was not a result of political alienation in the 1580s, but was a powerful reality in Ireland long before then, which subsequently became intertwined with the political alienation that grew so profoundly over the course of Elizabeth's reign.

By contrast with England, where Catholicism atrophied over time as the vast majority of Catholics either embraced the resonant liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer or died, the Catholic community in Ireland was able to communicate its faith to the next generations to remarkable effect. The ultimate outcome of the Tudor Reformations proved to be radically different on either side of the Irish Sea. The twenty Irish-born householders who attended Protestant services in Dublin in 1600 would have represented 1 person in 500 of a population of 10,000 inhabitants. At the same time, the vast majority of the English attended Protestant services, even in Lancashire, the most ‘Catholic’ shire in England, where recusants numbered only about 1 person in 27 in 1604.Footnote ⁸⁷ Irish Protestants were too few in number to form a self-sustaining community and they became absorbed into the immigrant English community.

VI

In an earlier paper in this Journal I demonstrated that there were striking commonalities between the Church in early Tudor England and that in the Pale.Footnote ⁸⁸ Religious conditions in the Pale were not very dissimilar to those which ‘revisionist’ historians have discerned in contemporary England.Footnote ⁸⁹ None the less, in the Pale, as in England, there was a considerable degree of what Ethan Shagan characterised as ‘collaboration’ between the crown and a conservatively-minded elite.Footnote ⁹⁰ Under Henry viii an Irish parliament endorsed the royal supremacy, papal jurisdiction in the Pale was ended and the religious orders were dissolved.Footnote ⁹¹ Under Edward vi the mass was displaced by the first Book of Common Prayer in Dublin and in some other Anglophone towns.Footnote ⁹² If one views the Tudor Reformation simply as an act of state to assert royal authority over the Church,Footnote ⁹³ then progress was certainly made in the Pale.

On the other hand, the assault on Catholic beliefs in Ireland was much more muted than it was in England. There were no Irish contributions to the religious debates in print waged under Henry viii or his son, nor is there certain evidence of such tracts circulating in Ireland.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such Reformation preaching as there was in Ireland depended almost entirely on George Browne, archbishop of Dublin (1536–54), and Edward Staples, bishop of Meath (1529–54). Yet Browne recoiled from the radicalism of Edward vi's Reformation and did not preach at all from November 1547 until September 1548, when he delivered a conservative sermon directed against Walter the Scot, whom he castigated for Lutheran beliefs.Footnote ⁹⁵ Though Browne was brought to heel, he subsequently preached the same two innocuous sermons year after year for the rest of Edward's reign.Footnote ⁹⁶ Staples preached his first Protestant sermon in November 1548, in Dublin, but it aroused virulent hostility in Meath and even a call for him to be burned as a heretic. Staples is known to have preached only one other sermon for certain in Edward's reign and, according to Anthony St Leger, the viceroy, the reaction was such that he was unlikely to repeat the experience.Footnote ⁹⁷ That is not to suggest that preaching the Reformation was futile: beyond the Pale the English former friar John Bale, bishop of Ossory (1552–3), demonstrated that passion, energy and imagination could inspire enthusiasm for the ‘Word of God’ in Ireland, at least according to his own account.Footnote ⁹⁸ With the support of the local secular officials Bale was able to compel the clergy of Kilkenny, regardless of their profound antipathy to his advanced Protestant teachings, to obey his directives to strip Catholic paraphernalia from the city's churches and use the first Book of Common Prayer, though even he could not get them to adopt the second Prayer Book.Footnote ⁹⁹ More significant is the fact that on the very day that Mary Tudor's accession as queen was proclaimed in Kilkenny, some young men of the city under his direction staged two Protestant plays at the market cross, with music and songs: a tragedy called ‘God's promises’ in the forenoon and a comedy called ‘John the Baptist's preachings’ in the afternoon, ‘to the small contentation of the priests and other Papists there’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ That incident strikes me as the best indicator of the possibility of a Reformation breakthrough in Kilkenny if Bale had enjoyed more time. In the event, though, his very brief ministry failed to engender a community of Protestants in that city. None the less, Bale offers a hint of what might have been possible if more Protestant preachers had been active in Ireland.

Archbishop Cranmer and the English privy council struggled to find other English Protestants who were willing to become bishops in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thomas Lancaster was appointed to Kildare but Hugh Goodacre, the royal appointee to Armagh, died before he ever saw his diocese, though it is improbable that he was killed by poison procured by the priests of Armagh as Bale alleged.Footnote ¹⁰² Still, the effort made under Edward vi to recruit zealous evangelists for Ireland was not repeated in Elizabeth's reign. On the other hand, there was no dissolution of the chantries in the Pale and there was no ‘stripping of the altars’ in Edward's reign.Footnote ¹⁰³ Furthermore, there was still no directive issued to place English Bibles in every church in the Pale as had been issued in England back in Henry viii's reign. Arguably, Catholicism in Ireland came through the early Tudor Reformations relatively unscathed compared with England primarily because it was not challenged effectively by crown officials, or by committed Protestant preachers or layfolk in local communities. The viceroys, Leonard Grey and Anthony St Leger, proceeded cautiously in advancing religious change, partly perhaps because of their personal beliefs, and partly because the Kildare rebellion, in which the rebels condemned Henry viii as ‘accursed’ and swore allegiance to the pope, the Holy Roman emperor and to Lord Offaly, the rebel leader, served as a warning of how religious controversy could undermine royal authority even in the Pale.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

That, of course, begs the question as to why Evangelical/Protestant ideas inspired so very few adherents in Ireland in the reigns of Henry viii or his son. One may speculate that attachment to the old religion may have been such that the Reformation simply failed to resonate among the people in Ireland, including the Anglophone elites in the Pale. The extraordinary burgeoning of the mendicant communities across Ireland,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ the increasingly active roles that men and women were playing in the life of the Irish Church at parish level,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ and the renovation and adornment of their local churches and chapels, may have satisfied people's aspirations for religious reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This is not to suggest that the strength of Catholic convictions alone was decisive in thwarting the Reformation – England's experience demonstrates that that was not necessarily the case – yet it must have been significant in influencing responses to the Reformation. The fact that Irish overseas trade was focused primarily on ports on the conservative western seaboard of England, and to a lesser degree with France and Spain, was conducive to religious conservatism. The number of Irish graduates was very small, which in turn precluded the wide dissemination of new theological insights that might otherwise have been encountered in England's universities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Irish women, who very rarely had the opportunity to travel overseas, played an important role in resisting the Reformation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It seems that circumstances conspired to insulate the Irish from the full impact of the ideas of the Reformation before Elizabeth's reign. James Murray reckoned that in Dublin the Henrician Reformation failed to make ‘an impact’ and that the enforcement of the Edwardian Reformation was particularly slack.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Brendan Scott reckoned the same for Meath diocese.Footnote ¹¹¹ Archbishop Dowdall was able to hold Edward vi's Reformation at bay in Armagh diocese until he went into exile in 1551 because, he said, that ‘he would never be bishop where the holy Mass (as he called it) was abolished’, while Goodacre, his successor, never reached Armagh.Footnote ¹¹² However, there is a significant caveat: Dowdall's flight into exile strongly suggests that he did not see any possibility of being able to galvanise the people in his diocese to resist Edward vi's Reformation much longer. That does not prove that he thought that Catholicism was a lost cause in the Pale in 1551, but it probably indicates that he was far from sanguine about its future. No one knew then that the young king was soon to die.

At the same time, while one might highlight indications that Edward's Reformation was not doomed to inevitable failure, the fact remains that it actually made little progress in the Pale. Eamon Duffy claims that the early Tudor Reformations made limited progress in England too.Footnote ¹¹³ He asserts that ‘sincere Protestants were an unrepresentative minority, [and] the country at large was still, even in 1553, predominantly Catholic in sympathy’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Interestingly Ethan Shagan, an avowed ‘post-revisionist’, agrees that even by 1553 ‘there were few conversions to Protestantism’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ If Duffy were correct then the religious situation in the Pale, wherein Protestantism made very little headway by 1553, would be remarkably similar to that across England.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, that was not the case.

From the start of Elizabeth's reign, despite the vigorous Marian reaction,Footnote ¹¹⁷ there was a community of Protestants that was sufficiently large and sufficiently well-placed to take up positions of power in Church and State across England to ensure that the queen's Reformation was endorsed by parliament, enforced by crown officials from the centre and in the localities, propagated in parishes, and accepted by congregations. The situation was radically different to that in the Irish Pale, and across Ireland generally, where in spite of securing parliamentary endorsement Elizabeth's Reformation could neither be enforced nor propagated effectively in the absence of an Irish Protestant community. Ireland experienced a Reformation without reformers, and that was a major reason why the Reformation failed in Ireland. The course of Elizabeth's Reformation in the Pale shows what might have happened in England if ‘revisionist’ historians are correct in denying the true scale of Protestant progress there by 1553. By implication it suggests the need for a new reassessment of the impact of the Reformation in England before Elizabeth's reign.Footnote ¹¹⁸