Patrick J. Ryan is to be congratulated for writing a very fine and very substantial book about an important figure in Elizabethan Ireland, while Lisheen Publications have done a splendid high quality production. Archbishop Miler Magrath has already been the subject of two biographies, neither of them flattering; by Most Rev. Robert Wyse Jackson, a former dean of Cashel and retired bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe, which was subtitled ‘the scoundrel of Cashel’, and by Fr Odhrán Ó Duáin, a Franciscan priest for whom Magrath was the ‘rógaire easpaig’. Fr Ryan’s subtitle, ‘the enigma of Cashel’, reflects his less judgmental attitude towards his subject.
Miler was christened Maol Muire Mag Craith. He was descended from a long line of coarbs of Termon Dabeog in western Ulster. Coarbs were tenants on episcopal lands, but they played a wider role in the Church across most of the north of Ireland. Ryan highlights Magrath’s ‘great proficiency in classical Latin’ and the ‘quality and fluency of his English’ (pp 13, 15), though we have no idea whether he acquired his linguistic skills in a local studia particularia in Ulster or in a Franciscan school, for Magrath became a Conventual Franciscan in 1540. He was clearly a very able young friar as he worked for his order in Spain and in the Spanish Netherlands and he impressed leading Spanish Jesuits with his commitment to Catholicism and his considerable intelligence; the latter feature attracted favourable comments from English officials subsequently. He had the education, ability and sheer confidence to allow him to command respect wherever he went in Europe.
In 1565 Magrath was appointed as the Catholic bishop of Down and Connor. However, he subsequently conformed to the Elizabethan Church. Ryan handles the bishop’s conversion with sensitivity, highlighting the fact that Magrath was imprisoned for three months and was threatened with torture before he finally converted, and he may have been genuinely convinced that Protestantism was closer to the truth than what he had been taught. In view of his subsequent life, though, one wonders whether Magrath was simply left doubting the possibility of knowing what was true.
After his conversion Magrath was promoted to Clogher by the queen, but failed to assert authority there in the face of local hostility. In 1571 he was appointed as the queen’s archbishop of Cashel instead, a position he held for the next fifty years. There is ‘almost a total dearth’ of evidence about how the Church actually functioned under Magrath’s leadership (p. 65). Ryan suggests that it is ‘unlikely’ that Protestantism was making any headway in the dioceses since the clergy ‘had neither the Book of Common Prayer nor, it seems, any form of catechism’ (p. 62). He mentions, but does not highlight the significance of the fact that, ‘No candidates for the Established Church were forthcoming from the families that traditionally supplied clergy to both dioceses’ (p. 64). The people of the local towns, including the episcopal towns of Cashel and Fethard, refused to attend Protestant services or receive communion. Indeed, the bishops and priests who returned from Catholic colleges on mainland Europe found very receptive audiences for their Counter-Reformation ministry in Magrath’s dioceses. Chapter eight shows that Magrath was on friendly terms with a number of the Counter-Reformation clergy operating in his dioceses, but the relationship became ‘more erratic and ambiguous’ because the archbishop did not hesitate to betray some of them to the English to save his job. He used the fact that he arrested three bishops and five priests as a ‘trump card’ whenever he was challenged for a lack of zeal (p. 89).
There is good reason to question Magrath’s religious commitment to Protestantism. His wife and nine children were all Catholics, and he secured a papal dispensation to have them recognised as legitimate in the eyes of the Catholic Church. He employed a ‘notorious Papist’ to educate his children (p. 107), though he also sent his eldest son to Westminster College, and two other sons to Oxford. It is certain that he died a Catholic, but waited until he was 100 years old before being reconciled to Rome.
As a prelate of the Church of Ireland his greed was legendary, and he used his position in the Church to get his hands on cash to establish his children as landowners across Ormond, and back home in Termon Magrath. Ryan examines the visitations of the Church in Magrath’s dioceses in the early seventeenth century which, in addition to Cashel and Emly, included Waterford and Lismore, and later the dioceses of Killala and Achonry, to reveal the pitiful state to which they were reduced under his care.
Nonetheless, as this book makes very clear, Magrath was tolerated because of his usefulness as one of the crown’s most valuable and valued sources of intelligence on Ireland, and especially Ulster, towards the end of the sixteenth century. Magrath may not have become a sincere Protestant but he was a sincere anglophile. He genuinely believed that Ireland’s future was tied to England’s. The book concludes with a subtle consideration of Magrath’s epitaph in Cashel’s cathedral which highlights his fifty years of service to England, but hints at regret at not being a better pastor. All in all, this is an interesting book about a very interesting character who played no small part in religion and politics in Elizabethan Ireland. My one criticism is that more might have been done to consider Magrath’s significance in the light of the most recent scholarship.
