The history of late Henrician Ireland has for some time been typically understood as a period wherein officials developed a conciliatory solution to governing the country. This thesis has its roots in the study of ‘surrender and regrant’ conducted by William F. T. Butler at the start of the twentieth century, but was most forcefully argued for by Brendan Bradshaw in The Irish constitutional revolution of the sixteenth century published in 1979.Footnote 1 Elements of Bradshaw’s thesis were in turn adopted by Ciaran Brady in his study of Tudor policy in Ireland between 1536 and 1588.Footnote 2 In brief Bradshaw contended that in the aftermath of the Kildare Rebellion an Old English-led reform movement succeeded in instituting a constitutional revolution in Irish government, the cornerstones of which were the promulgation of Henry VIII as king of Ireland and the implementation of the programme of ‘surrender and regrant’. As such the period is depicted as one in which benign policies were favoured in an effort to incorporate the Gaelic polity within the Tudor dominions in a peaceful fashion. Brady, while emphasising the self-interest that motivated Tudor officials in Ireland, also argued that conciliatory reform was favoured in the aftermath of the Kildare Rebellion.
This thesis has dominated interpretations of late Henrician Ireland for the past several decades.Footnote 3 However, this view of the period requires considerable re-evaluation, particularly so as these previous studies only looked at a limited range of documents. Bradshaw’s argument that an Old English reform movement was in evidence in the Henrician period was based upon just four policy papers, while his interpretation of these documents alone is open to challenge.Footnote 4 Similarly Brady’s study was primarily concerned with the chief governors and consequently prioritised the role of viceroys such as Anthony St Leger in the formation of policy, rather than the totality of views on Irish policy at the time.Footnote 5 What neither study attempted was an analysis of the whole range of treatises and other statements on Irish policy produced by both senior officials and individuals not occupying high office from the Kildare Rebellion in 1534 through to the close of the reign in 1547. There are scores of these papers which, when examined, reveal that the majority of senior officials in Ireland in the aftermath of the Kildare Rebellion favoured an aggressive approach towards Gaelic Ireland. In particular they sought to convince Henry VIII and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, of the desirability of conquering the lordships of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs in Wicklow and Carlow, or what they termed ‘south Leinster’.
The following paper is not the first study of this campaign for the reduction or conquest of south Leinster. The centrality of this issue to the history of late Henrician Ireland was pointed to some time ago by Dean Gunther White in his ground-breaking, though often overlooked, study of the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland.Footnote 6 More recently Christopher Maginn has examined this concern with conquering south Leinster in his study of the O’Byrne and O’Toole lordships.Footnote 7 However the campaign for the reduction of south Leinster has not to date been fully examined. In particular the far reaching consequences of this desire for a programme of regional conquest of Gaelic Ireland adjoining the Pale to the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland have not been recognised.
What follows demonstrates that a lobby advocating the conquest of south Leinster existed amongst senior officials in Ireland following the Kildare Rebellion. This campaign was ultimately unsuccessful as in 1537 Henry VIII rejected the proposal as being too costly, leading to a period when cheap, conciliatory methods of governance were favoured in Ireland, producing the conciliatory programme of ‘surrender and regrant’. But even in the years from late 1540 to 1543 when ‘surrender and regrant’ was being most actively pursued many senior officials continued to favour a strategy of regional conquest in Leinster. Such a conquest was eventually initiated in 1546 following the government’s incursion into the lordships of the O’Connors and O’Mores, albeit in the midlands rather than in south Leinster, as had earlier been envisaged. This article will demonstrate that the concern to reduce south Leinster and the eventual incursion into the midlands were inherently linked, both in terms of the personnel involved and in the use of a strategy of regional conquest. Finally it will argue that these developments, which ultimately led to the first Tudor plantation in Ireland, were pivotal to the inception of a strategy of conquest and can be identified as the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland.
I
It is not surprising that a lobby for a programme of regional conquest developed in the mid-1530s. A renewed conquest of Ireland and regional colonisation had remained policy options in Ireland throughout the late medieval period and were intermittently recommended. Moreover, these proposals had often focused on the Gaelic lordships of Leinster adjoining the Pale. For instance, in the late fourteenth century Richard II had proposed to expel some of the septs from the province and colonise those lands with English settlers, although he eventually resolved to negotiate a series of conciliatory indentures with those lords.Footnote 8
In the early sixteenth century a series of policy papers were written advocating a renewed conquest of Ireland. For example, ‘The State of Ireland and Plan for its Reformation’ composed in 1515, which outlined a programme of political, social and cultural reform, was primarily concerned with re-conquering the earldom of Ulster, but a proposal was also made to colonise south Leinster from ‘the cyttye of Dublyn to the porttownes of Wexford and Rosse’.Footnote 9 The second earl of Surrey, during his vice-regal expedition to Ireland in the early 1520s, suggested to Henry that he could proceed with either a full-scale conquest of Ireland or a gradual, piecemeal expansion of the lordship.Footnote 10 Though south Leinster and the Irish there were not specifically earmarked, it was inevitable given their proximity to the Pale that they would have been amongst the first lordships to experience increasing intervention. Finally, ‘A discourse of the evil state of Ireland’, most likely written around 1526 by Robert Cowley, outlined a programme for the conquest of Ireland.Footnote 11 The strategy it outlined covered much of Leinster, with an emphasis on advancing westward to the Shannon. However the principal concern was with the MacMurrough Kavanaghs and the O’Byrnes whose lordships would be reduced through the establishment of garrisons therein, while O’Connor was also singled out for consideration. This was a strongly pro-Butler proposal and the focus was on reducing those Gaelic lordships in Leinster who were most closely tied to the house of Kildare.Footnote 12
II
Thus, policy speculators in Ireland in the years immediately preceding the Kildare Rebellion were wholly aware that a renewed conquest remained a viable policy option. But the events of the 1530s led to the development of a specific set of circumstances which strongly recommended increased intervention in those parts of Gaelic Ireland immediately adjoining the Pale. Central here was the re-orientation of crown relations with lordships such as those of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles following the Kildare Rebellion. Since the late fifteenth century the crown’s relations with these lordships had been mediated through the earls of Kildare. This two-tier, suzerain-vassal system, as Christopher Maginn has termed it, saw the Geraldines exercise a nominal suzerainty over many of the Gaelic lordships of south Leinster in the late medieval period, which in turn regulated the degree to which the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and others made incursions into the four-county, Dublin-centred Pale.Footnote 13 With the destruction of the house of Kildare a new modus operandi for dealing with those elements became necessary. The new approach that senior officials were to favour was to conquer or reduce these lordships.
While this was certainly the most important motive for intervention in south Leinster other factors also recommended such an approach. In particular the decision to confiscate the lands of absentee English landholders in the Irish Reformation parliament of 1536 contributed to a desire to undertake a more aggressive strategy in south Leinster.Footnote 14 A great proportion of the lands in question were located in Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow, where the duke of Norfolk and the earls of Shrewsbury and Wiltshire possessed extensive estates.Footnote 15 The absence of these lords from these estates had however strengthened the Irish of south Leinster. For instance, in 1533 James Fitzgerald reported that Norfolk’s lands in Carlow had been made waste by the Irish there.Footnote 16 Thus, these lands were confiscated by the crown to be re-distributed to active landholders who might re-invigorate crown rule in the region. The availability of these lands for settlement doubtlessly acted as a further, more self-serving incentive to those lobbying for intervention in south Leinster.
This land rush was further augmented as plans were undertaken in the mid-1530s to begin dissolving Ireland’s religious houses.Footnote 17 Nine houses were dissolved in the course of the first suppression campaign in 1536 and 1537, many of them lying in or near south Leinster. Given that many of those who were granted leases of these suppressed houses were some of the strongest advocates of the reduction of south Leinster at this time it is plausible that an extension of the Pale into parts of Wicklow and Carlow was viewed favourably as a means to secure these new landholdings.Footnote 18
The final factor which favoured intervention in south Leinster was the growing influence of the Butlers in the post-Rebellion period. The Butlers had long held an interest in the area but efforts to extend their influence in Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow during the 1520s had been frustrated by the earls of Kildare.Footnote 19 With the removal of the Geraldines’ influence from south Leinster the growth of Butler power in the region was revitalised. Moreover, that much of the lobby to reduce south Leinster was effectively a Butler lobby is clear from the make-up of those who advocated this approach. Of these the chief baron of the exchequer, Patrick Finglas, and the father and son pair, Robert and Walter Cowley, were either Butler clients or supporters, while Piers Butler, earl of Ossory and his son, James, were amongst those lobbying for the reduction of south Leinster.Footnote 20 Thus, a number of quite specific circumstances coalesced in the mid-1530s to favour intervention in south Leinster. In tandem a coherent lobby emerged amongst senior officials and interest-groups advocating this approach.
III
Studies of lobbying in early modern Ireland have generally tended to focus on individual communities such as the Old English of the Pale who sought to further their sectional interests, or how lobbying was associated with religious confessionalisation.Footnote 21 Yet few studies have examined in detail the dynamics of lobbying amongst groups of individuals of disparate backgrounds and involving both Old English and New English officials. If a ‘lobby’ may be defined in a general sense as a group of persons supporting a cause, and ‘to lobby’ as to exert influence so as to procure the passage of a measure, albeit more usually understood in a parliamentary setting,Footnote 22 then the campaign for the reduction of Leinster which was undertaken between late 1535 and early 1537 certainly fits these parameters. The lobby included the lord deputy, Leonard Grey, the under-treasurer, William Brabazon, the master of the rolls, John Alen, the chief justice of king’s bench, Gerald Aylmer, the chief justice of common pleas, Thomas Luttrell, the bishop of Meath, Edward Staples, the clerk of the crown, Robert Cowley, his son and the soon to be solicitor-general, Walter Cowley, and the earl of Ossory, who between late 1535 and 1537 all either composed policy papers that urged a conquest of the lordships of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs, or else subscribed their names to numerous letters explicitly advocating this initiative.
The development of this lobby was greatly aided by the availability of a coherent strategy for how to proceed in south Leinster. This was the approach developed by the chief baron of the exchequer, Patrick Finglas, and promoted in his widely read treatise ‘A breviat of the conquest of Ireland and of the decaie of the same’, the date of composition of which is unclear, but the great majority of which was written by the mid-1530s.Footnote 23 This paper is more usually remarked on for the extensive analysis it offers of the establishment and decay of the medieval lordship, but the purport of Finglas’s survey was to rationalise the project outlined after this historical survey. In this Finglas urged a renewed conquest of Ireland beginning with the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs whom he claimed ‘were not in this hundreth yeres and moo febler to be conquered than they be nowe’.Footnote 24 This, he stated, would best be undertaken by establishing a series of garrisons throughout Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow which should be apportioned to the young lords and knights of England and ‘goode Englishe capitayne[s]’.Footnote 25 Key locations identified were the castles and manors of Old Ross, Carlow, Leighlin, Wexford, Ferns, Wicklow and Arklow.Footnote 26 Finglas’s proposals were hugely influential amongst those who lobbied for the reduction of south Leinster in the years that followed.
The suppression of the Kildare Rebellion following the surrender of Thomas FitzGerald, tenth earl of Kildare, on 24 August 1535 ushered in the campaign to reduce south Leinster. Just over two weeks later the first paper urging the conquest of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs was composed by the under-treasurer, William Brabazon.Footnote 27 In two tracts on various aspects of Irish policy which he dispatched to Cromwell in 1535 he laid out clear ideas on Leinster:
Iff it now stond with the Kinges pleasure, the land of Irlond may be at commaundement, as His Grace will have, if it be quicklye handled; and in especiall, to banisshe the Tooles, the Burnes, and the Cavenaghs, which, with McMargho and his secte, which is easie to be done, and to procede further into other parties.Footnote 28
That Brabazon appears to have initiated the campaign is of considerable importance, for as will be seen he was central to military intervention in the midlands in 1546.
Support for the reduction of south Leinster remained relatively muted through late 1535 and the opening months of 1536. Thereafter, though, the lobbying intensified. One of the clearest proposals was sent from John Alen to the king in October 1536.Footnote 29 Here he claimed that ‘if those parties of Leynster were conquest, reformed, or subdued to your due obedience, wherin McMurgho, the Byrnes, and Tholes, nowe inhabite’ then it would ‘kepe this lande in a staye’.Footnote 30 This was suggestive of a willingness to retain the Gaelic Irish there if they proved amenable to English government, but Alen went on to relieve any doubt that his own preference was for the removal of the Irish and that any countenance of them would be strictly owing to cool economic necessity:
It mought be gathered herupon, that my meaning is here, that Your Grace shulde banishe all the wilde Irishe out of their landis. Althoughe I wolde it wer so, yit that is not myn entente, for I do not doubte, but the inhabitauntes of their landes mought be made good subjectes, the heddis being subdued; and if they mought be all banished, thinke it were not a litle difficultie to inhabite the lande agayne.Footnote 31
Although south Leinster was his foremost concern, Alen also recommended the establishment of five or six forts in O’Connor’s country to recover that area.Footnote 32 This is significant as Alen became perhaps the staunchest advocate of intervention in the midlands along with south Leinster in the months prior to the invasion of Laois and Offaly.
The most extreme advocate of renewed conquest was unquestionably Robert Cowley who devised a project for the wholesale subjugation of Ireland in 1536. This was to begin in south Leinster where a series of fortifications were to be erected. Cowley’s approach was almost certainly derived directly from Finglas, as the sites chosen for such garrisons, notably Wicklow, Arklow, Ferns, Leighlin and Idrone, closely mirrored those earmarked by Finglas in the ‘Breviat’.Footnote 33 Following this would be an advance into Ulster, where Carrickfergus and Carlingford were to be re-edified and a walled town constructed at Armagh.Footnote 34 Similar provisions were also outlined for Munster and Connaught. Cowley’s ideas were extreme in other ways also, and his advocacy of scorched earth tactics to induce famine conditions, although a measure which had been employed in the course of suppressing the Kildare Rebellion, was not to be expressed so forthrightly again in a treatise until the Elizabethan period.Footnote 35
Robert Cowley sent his proposal to Cromwell sometime in June 1536, perhaps on 19 June, the day that his son, Walter, composed his own paper on the issue for Cromwell to consult.Footnote 36 Walter’s scheme was less expansive, simply recommending the placing of a force of three hundred men at the castle of Ferns in Wexford;
wherin they shall do suche stede, to sett and survey the countie of Wexford, nowe the Kinges, to wyn the castels, holdes, and catail of the Kewanaghes and Briues, whiche lieth betwen Dublin, thEnglishe pale, and thErl of Ossorye, the Butlers, and the said countie; and folowyng sharply the next Marche that purpos, it shalbe desolate of the Irishry, and made to the hand for to inhabyt.Footnote 37
Additionally, he envisaged that 200 horse under the command of the lord deputy in the Pale would aid this force, while Ossory would provide additional support.
The most extensive proposal for pacifying Leinster, however, was not produced until early 1537. ‘A memoriall, or a note, for the wynnyng of Leynster’ was a memo drawn up collectively by the lord deputy and council as a means to convince Henry of the appeal of planting and colonising the lands of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs.Footnote 38 The document was dispatched to England on 10 February 1537 with a covering letter from the council which stated that they had devised the project to convince the king that ‘no interprise mought be so honorable, neither more profectable for Your Highnes, than the reducing of Leynster to your obedience’.Footnote 39 The signatories to this covering letter included Grey, Ossory, James Butler, Brabazon, Luttrell, Finglas, Gerald Aylmer, lord chancellor Alen, John Barnewell, and the archbishop of Dublin, George Browne.Footnote 40 No clearer indication can be given of the collective lobbying for the reduction of south Leinster by a majority of senior ministers than this document.
The scheme outlined was extensive and again was largely derived from Finglas’s ‘Breviat’. The three lordships were initially to be emptied of inhabitants. Some ten or twelve thousand settlers would then be brought in. A series of walled towns and castles were to be established at Wicklow, Arklow, Ferns, Enniscorthy, Ross, Leighlin and Carlow. In addition estates would be granted to the younger sons of English gentry families with titles such as lord of Wicklow, each of whom would maintain a certain number of soldiers that would be established as freeholders. To preside over this new nobility it was envisaged that an earldom of Carlow would be created with estates in Carlow, Ferns and Idrone. To cement the conquest it was suggested that 1,600 troops would be necessary, of which 600 were to be under the newly created earl, with the remainder commanded by the lord deputy.Footnote 41
IV
These were just the most expansive papers written to lobby for the reduction of Leinster and a constant stream of additional correspondence poured from the Irish administration to the king and Cromwell on the issue throughout 1536 and into 1537. On 2 January 1536 the Butlers signalled their support for an offensive into the lands of the MacMurroughs, O’Byrnes and O’Tooles in a letter which was signed by Ossory and his son, Leonard Grey, John Alen and Gerald Aylmer.Footnote 42 The following months saw Grey contemplate a slightly different tactic as backed with the threat of military force he negotiated a series of indentures with various figures within those lordships, an approach which would prove highly significant in later years. These agreements provided for the principals of those lordships to acknowledge Henry’s suzerainty in return for recognition as subjects by the crown. Indentures of this nature were concluded with Tadhg MacGerald O’Byrne on 22 January and with Cahir MacInnycross of the MacMurrough Kavanaghs in the summer of 1536.Footnote 43
These agreements somewhat foreshadowed the policy of ‘surrender and regrant’, but this conciliatory approach remained peripheral at this time in preference for a more concerted campaign of coercive military intervention. This was borne out in correspondence between Dublin Castle and Whitehall in the latter half of 1536 and early 1537 as Grey and his officials’ support for the reduction of south Leinster reached a crescendo. The most direct appeal yet by the lord deputy and council was made in a letter to the king on 26 June. Here they declared that ‘such oportunytie, meanes, and waies for coquesting, subduying and reforming of your hole domynion’ had been made available ‘as the like hath nat ben seen theise hunderith yeres past, and God knoweth whether the like shall ever be seen agayne in our daies’.Footnote 44 Following this they not only advanced the case for a conquest of the lordships of Carlow and Wicklow, but explicitly acknowledged the near continuous lobbying which they had been engaged in thereon:
May it please Your Highnes to call unto your gracious memrory, how ofte and many tymes and for the more parte contynually, we have advertized Your Grace and your Counsaille, that Your Highnes, ne your heiers, shulde be at any assured stay to have your domynion defended from Irishmen, without your greate charges to be sustayned a new, ever within few yeres, onleste ye did conqueste Mcmurho, Omurho, Obyrne, Othole, and theire kinsmen, which inhabite bytwene Dublin and Waxforde, inhabiting the same with Inglishmen, or, at the leaste, subdue and reforme the saide parsons to a due obedience.Footnote 45
This letter was signed by Grey, Brabazon, Alen, Finglas, Luttrell, Edward Staples and John Barnewell.
As this lobbying was being undertaken military forays were also made into south Leinster. In May 1536 Brabazon conducted a campaign into Carlow, while Grey made a further incursion against the MacMurrough Kavanaghs in June, actions which were conceivably intended to convince Henry and Cromwell of the feasibility of their aims.Footnote 46 Further letters followed on 29 October to Henry and 23 November to Cromwell.Footnote 47 The latter gave the most unambiguous statement of their position yet:
And as concernyng our determynations for anny honorabell and profitable enterprise to be advaunced this next yere, we have severall tymes advertised the Kinges Majestie, and your Lordeship, that, in our opinions, ther is no enterprise more honorable, neyther more profitable for the Kinge and his heyres, neyther more feasible, and with les charges to be executed, then the reformyng of Leynster; especiallie thois parties betwixt Dublin and Waterforde by the sea cost, wherin Macmurgho, O’Brynne, the Tholes, and ther nations, been enhabited.Footnote 48
Having failed to impart the necessity of conquering south Leinster through their correspondence and through the individual treatises on the topic written by figures such as Alen and Brabazon, the decision was taken to draw up the ‘Memoriall’ early in 1537 and dispatch it to Henry on 10 February.Footnote 49
If this last act was intended as such a definitive statement of their ideas on the conquest of Leinster that it would finally meet with the king’s acceptance the viceroy and councillors were to be thoroughly surprised by Henry’s response. The government of Ireland, far from being geared towards the ‘reducing’ of Leinster, was to be run with financial retrenchment as its guiding principle. In a scathing letter, which pointed towards blatant corruption and fiscal profligacy within the Irish administration, Henry stated:
Good counsailors shuld, before their oune private gaynes, have respecte to their princes honor, and to the publique weale of the cuntrey whereof they have charge. A greate sorte of you (We must be plain) desire nothing ells, but to reign in estimacion, and to flece, from tyme to time, all that you may catche from Us.Footnote 50
In keeping with this new found parsimony the size of the garrison was to be reduced, not augmented as the council’s policy of conquest would have necessitated.Footnote 51 The campaign for the reduction of Leinster which had been lobbied for so vocally since late 1535 had seemingly ended in failure.
V
Henry had clearly decided against pursuing a programme of regional conquest. However, while this did bring to an end the period of most active lobbying for the reduction of south Leinster this policy option was not abandoned. It resurfaced frequently in the months and years that followed. While at court later in 1537 Robert Cowley submitted a proposal to appoint Peter Talbot as a captain over the Harolds’ country bordering the O’Toole lordship, a proposal which was actually implemented.Footnote 52 Thomas Luttrell’s submission to the royal commissioners who arrived in the summer of 1537 to investigate Irish affairs remarked that Leinster should be reformed so that the lordship ‘mought be dyschargeid of the said inwarde enymise’.Footnote 53 Similarly, John Alen in his submission to the same commission, while not dwelling on the subject of subduing south Leinster, stated that the reduction of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs was still necessary.Footnote 54
Indeed there is evidence of at least one major proposal to that effect being made in the summer of 1537. This was submitted to Cromwell by three Wexford landholders, Walter BrownFootnote 55, John DevereuxFootnote 56 and Alexander Keating.Footnote 57, Footnote 58 Unlike the great majority of figures lobbying for a conquest of south Leinster at the time these figures were not high ranking members of the administration in Dublin. As such their suit indicates that the drive to reduce this region extended well beyond Dublin Castle and had been adopted by regional landholders independent of senior officials. In their proposal they recommended planting south Leinster between Dublin and Wexford with five or six thousand men:
we do think that five or six thousand, part soldiers, part husbandmen, and other craftsmen, to till and inhabit the lands between Dublin and Wexford, within little continuance would be a good benefit in augmenting of our sovereign lord’s inheritance, to the great defence and comfort of all his natural subjects.Footnote 59
Again, this was not a radical departure from the plans laid out in Finglas’s ‘Breviat’. However, a novel proposal by Brown, Devereux and Keating was that, in light of the parsimony of the king in 1537, the said lands should be leased to them in order to undertake a semi-private plantation, a forerunner of the semi-private plantations undertaken by Thomas Smith and the first earl of Essex in northeast Ulster in the early 1570s.
Calls for an incursion into Wicklow and Carlow became muted thereafter, as the government became preoccupied with concerns elsewhere. In particular the formation of the so-called Geraldine League and efforts to impose a crown candidate as earl of Desmond distracted from the development of a new programme of government from early 1538 through to March 1540 when the young Gerald FitzGerald, the future eleventh earl of Kildare, departed for the continent bringing unrest to an end.Footnote 60 Thereafter a new proposal quickly surfaced for the reduction of Leinster in November 1540. This was a scheme for the ‘reformatyon of Laynster’ devised by a cohort of council members and the Butlers.Footnote 61 It recommended the appointment of a board of twelve officers or pensioners who would act as regional commanders throughout Leinster presided over by a ‘Greate Maister’ stationed at Ferns.Footnote 62 Two potential boards were provided at the conclusion of the document, one nominated by Ormond and the other by the council. The Butler panel recommended Ormond’s brother, Richard Butler, as Great Master, with John Travers, a client of the earl’s and the master of the ordnance, as chief pensioner.Footnote 63 Cahir MacArt Kavanagh was to fill the position of second pensioner with a number of other Kavanaghs, O’Byrnes and O’Tooles also included, while Watkin Apowell and Edmund Butler of Polestown were also nominated.Footnote 64 The council’s nominations were broadly similar. They too recommended Travers as first pensioner and Watkin Apowell and Edmund Butler, while the Kavanaghs again featured among their nominees.Footnote 65 However the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles were noticeably absent from their list, while a significant inclusion was the Wexford landholder, Walter Brown. But the vital point of departure between the Butler panel and that proposed by the council concerned the position of Great Master which was allocated to William Brabazon on the council’s list.Footnote 66 Clearly this initiative was not as militant as some of those favoured by Brabazon and others just a few years previously. Members of the Gaelic septs of south Leinster, for instance, made up half of the proposed pensioners. But there were distinct links. South Leinster remained the geographical focus, while the ostensible purpose of the scheme was broadly similar, to extend the Pale southwards into Wicklow and Carlow. Moreover many of the same individuals were involved. Clearly there was still a desire for a programme of regional conquest in Leinster in 1540.
VI
Henry’s response to this device was not positive. He dismissed it peremptorily stating ‘concerning your divise for a Greate Master… We doo in noo wyse lyke any parte of your divise’, a rejection which was almost certainly owing to his having been convinced of the merits of an alternative, cheaper strategy which had been proposed at this time.Footnote 67 This was the programme of conciliation adopted by Anthony St Leger as viceroy and known to posterity as ‘surrender and regrant’.Footnote 68 This process involved the formal surrender by certain Gaelic lords of their lands to Henry VIII upon which they were regranted their lands with title in the understanding that as loyal subjects they would undertake to anglicise their lordships.Footnote 69
Following Bradshaw’s thesis the programme of ‘surrender and regrant’ has become ubiquitous in the historiography of late Henrician Ireland.Footnote 70 But it should be clear from what has been said that a conciliatory approach to Gaelic Ireland was not a paramount concern for the majority of senior officials in the 1530s. Irish political circles at that time were dominated by a desire to begin a programme of regional conquest, while in respect of policy papers there is little or no comparable evidence showing support for a conciliatory constitutional approach during these years.Footnote 71 Moreover, Bradshaw’s assertions that this was an Old English-led constitutional, humanist, reform movement founded on the views of supposedly benign thinkers such as Patrick Finglas, in opposition to rapacious New English war-mongers exemplified by William Brabazon, must be challenged.Footnote 72 Finglas provided the blueprint for a programme of regional conquest of Gaelic Ireland beginning in south Leinster, while prominent Old English council members such as Gerald Aylmer and Thomas Luttrell recommended the reduction of south Leinster in their own papers or subscribed their names right alongside those of John Alen and William Brabazon on letters urging the same.
‘Surrender and regrant’, far from being the cornerstone of a constitutional revolution was, as Christopher Maginn has aptly described it, a ‘political alternative’ devised in response to Henry VIII’s unwillingness to invest in a costly military solution to governing Ireland.Footnote 73 This view is in fact confirmed by the very individual who oversaw the programme of ‘surrender and regrant’, Anthony St Leger. In a paper which he and his fellow commissioners addressed to Cromwell in 1538 coercive regional conquest was recommended. This concerned the O’Connor lordship of which it was stated ‘onlesse it be peopled with others then be there alredy, and also certen fortresses there buylded and warded, if it be gotten the one daye, it is loste the next’.Footnote 74 Thus, St Leger, on this evidence, would appear to have been a late convert to his own conciliatory strategy. The view of post-Kildare Rebellion Ireland as a period wherein conciliation was expressly favoured clearly requires considerable re-evaluation.
The specifics of the ‘political alternative’ favoured from the early 1540s onwards have been dealt with at length elsewhere.Footnote 75 For present purposes it is necessary simply to note that by late 1543 the first ‘surrender and regrant’ programme in its original vigour had come to an end. But even between 1540 and 1543 senior officials continued to advocate a coercive encroachment into south Leinster. Although the evidence for the proposal is second-hand, Brabazon, along with the dean of St Patrick’s cathedral, Edward Basnet, put forward a scheme to reform the O’Byrne lordship in 1540, one which was still under consideration as late as January 1544.Footnote 76 In May 1542 St Leger wrote to the king noting the need to reform Leinster. Indeed his utterances on this occasion were even suggestive that the viceroy viewed ‘surrender and regrant’ and intervention in south Leinster as intrinsically linked, asserting that formal agreements were being concluded with lords such as O’Neill in order to put the government on a firmer footing before commencing with the conquest of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs.Footnote 77
A few weeks later, in June 1542, Alen also returned to the topic describing it in a letter to Henry as ‘that stringe that I have alway harped on’.Footnote 78 Alen was crystal clear in his view that the Gaelic lineages in Carlow and Wicklow should be expulsed conclusively:
And thogh some think best … to receyve them to summission … I thinke best, les they and the residue sholde revolte hereafter, that now, whiles tyme serveth, to make that place sure, from whens the grounde of all treasons and rebellions hath most rysen … And better it were, in mine opynion, to have that cuntrie utterly desolated to fede wylde bestes … then to have soche a denne of thevys and traitors ther, in the middes of Your Majesties strenght.Footnote 79
A further offer by Ormond to undertake the reform of south Leinster was made in 1543, but again no action was taken, primarily owing to the earl’s unwillingness to relinquish certain lands in the region to the government for use as possible seats for garrisons.Footnote 80 Thereafter the issue was again shelved as the administration became principally concerned with facilitating the crown’s war effort against France and Scotland from late 1543 onwards.Footnote 81
VII
The war-effort against France, and in particular Scotland, dominated correspondence between officials in Ireland and the government in England through to 1546 when the conflict temporarily abated. This was the context in which a drastic alteration in Irish policy occurred. Throughout the 1540s attempts had been made by St Leger to negotiate a ‘surrender and regrant’ arrangement with Brian O’Connor Faly. This had been frustrated and a proposal to offer a viscountcy to O’Connor in the summer of 1545 had not come to fruition.Footnote 82 In tandem O’Connor’s actions had become increasingly disruptive in the midlands.Footnote 83
It was in this context that John Alen produced yet another treatise on Irish policy in 1546 which highlighted the changing views of Irish officials concerning the geographical focus of any potential programme of regional conquest in Leinster. This ‘Note on the State of Ireland with a Dyuise for the Same’ strongly criticised St Leger and suggested his conciliatory approach had actually strengthened the lords who had received titles from the king, while no progress had been made towards the anglicisation of their lordships. Furthermore he stated ‘in the reformation of Leynster … some thinge … moght haue been done more then is’.Footnote 84 Accordingly, he urged that the ‘capitaynes that haue charge in Leynster be furnyshed and put to it a fresh’, so that within three years the lands there could be confiscated to the crown.Footnote 85
Thus, in 1546 Alen yet again proposed the conquest of Wicklow and Carlow. But there was a new issue which now taxed Alen as much as south Leinster, if not more so. The O’Connor lordship, Alen argued, would also have to be conquered. Addressing the failure to conclude a ‘surrender and regrant’ arrangement with Brian O’Connor Faly he suggested that this prevarication had brought him to a greater strength than he had previously exercised. Following this he noted that ‘men of experience hath shewed me that it wer almost as facile to reduce Leynster to a lawe, as O’Chonor to the state he was in fyue or sixe yeares past … and what pease so ever he kepe … it is no small peril that he sholde haue this strength … so as it were goode to provyde for the worst’.Footnote 86 Refraining from directly urging intervention in Offaly, Alen nevertheless made his views implicitly clear when he stated that he would ‘not gyue counsell to contynue or begynne any warre, but I thynke it requisite not to leve the practyse of the severance of them, so as one man shall haue a suspecte strength’.Footnote 87 This is highly significant. In 1536 Alen had briefly recommended intervening in the O’Connor lordship, and here ten years later his strategic thinking appears to have altered to now favour to an equal degree both a conquest of south Leinster and intervention in the lordship of O’Connor Faly in the midlands.Footnote 88
However, St Leger remained an impediment to these designs. Much of his viceroyalty in the years prior to 1546 had centred on efforts to stabilise relations with O’Connor. That St Leger subsequently found himself confronted with charges of misconduct in office in 1546 hardly seems coincidental. These were brought by Alen,Footnote 89 OrmondFootnote 90 and Walter Cowley, three individuals who had favoured a more interventionist line in Leinster since the 1530s.Footnote 91 Moreover, during St Leger’s absence in London to defend himself against these charges a letter to the privy council from the interim administration, led by Brabazon as lord justice, expressed support for Alen. The signatories thereto included Brabazon, Aylmer and Luttrell.Footnote 92 While the documentary evidence for this period is admittedly scant it seems likely that a broad range of hawks amongst senior officials in Ireland who had favoured intervention in south Leinster since the 1530s, and who had increasingly begun to view the midlands as an arena for intervention, attempted to have St Leger removed from office in 1546 in order to facilitate steps towards this interventionist line. But in England St Leger was ultimately cleared of the charges ranged against him. Conversely, Alen was removed from his position as lord chancellor and Cowley was temporarily imprisoned, while Ormond died in an unrelated occurrence of food poisoning while in London.Footnote 93
However, St Leger returned to an Ireland where the political climate in the midlands had changed dramatically. Brabazon had launched a military incursion into the midlands in the summer of 1546 during St Leger’s absence in London.Footnote 94 It is unclear whether this was a pre-meditated act which the interim lord justice had intended to carry out in St Leger’s absence or if he was responding to an incursion by Donough O’Connor into Kildare that provided a convenient pretext for a general invasion of the O’Connor and O’More lands. Indeed the details of the entire action are remarkably scant for such a pivotal moment in the history of mid-Tudor Ireland.Footnote 95 There is for instance no extant letter or report outlining Brabazon’s actions from the administration in Dublin amongst the State Papers. Despite the paucity of the evidence it is clear that this was not a transitory campaign and Brabazon oversaw the establishment of a government fort and garrison known as Fort Governor at the site of the O’Connor castle at Daingean in Offaly. If St Leger favoured a reversal of this initiative then events in the months that followed acted against him. The situation in the midlands had been inflamed by Brabazon’s actions precluding an immediate cessation of the hostilities there. But far more significant were the changes pursuant from the death of Henry VIII. The new regime has generally been characterised as having been substantially more bellicose than that which preceded it, a trait which manifested itself in Ireland in the despatch of Edward Bellingham to oversee military activities in the midlands.Footnote 96
A concerted effort was now made to ensure that the incursion into the midlands was continued. This was led by Brabazon who produced a brief ‘Note’ on policy which he addressed to Bellingham late in 1547. Here he returned to what he noted was a very old theme, to ‘reduce to obedience … this Leinster’.Footnote 97 Claiming that more highly placed officials in Ireland had written on this topic than there was paper available he lamented ‘yet it is as it was’.Footnote 98 This was yet again a reference to the reduction of south Leinster, but Brabazon then proceeded to urge a continuation of the aggression shown in the midlands, specifically by maintaining the garrison at Daingean and establishing further settlements in the region to inhabit the midlands. This is pivotal. Brabazon, like Alen in his submission the previous year, had altered his strategic thinking to now favour intervention in the midlands in addition to the reduction of south Leinster which he had been writing in support of since 1535.
Yet clearly if figures such as Brabazon and Alen were to have a programme of regional conquest in south Leinster and the midlands undertaken then St Leger, whose political career since 1540 had been fashioned around conciliation and compromise with the Gaelic lords, would have to be removed from the vice-regal office. Accordingly, as in 1546, a series of charges of misconduct were drawn up against the embattled lord deputy. These ‘Matters’ were not signed or attributed, yet the question of who authored them is of paramount importance. In his authoritative article on the reign of Edward VI published in 1965 Dean Gunther White attributed the ‘Matters’ to Brabazon, an attribution which Maginn followed in his recent edition of the document.Footnote 99 White’s supposition that Brabazon was paramount seems convincing, but internal evidence points to John Alen also being involved in the composition, and it seems plausible that the document may have been compiled by a multitude of St Leger’s political opponents.Footnote 100 The text was a series of 139 charges laid against St Leger’s government. For the vast majority of these the names of individuals were written in the right-hand margins next to the points, indicating individuals who could elaborate further thereon. A passing reading of the document clarifies that not all those named in this respect were contributors, however many of them could have been. The links with the campaign for the reduction of Leinster in the 1530s are again striking. The names of Thomas Luttrell, Walter Cowley and Gerald Aylmer all appear in these marginal notes. These were all long-standing supporters of the reduction of Leinster and along with Brabazon and Alen comprised the remainder of those who had lobbied most forcefully for the reduction of Leinster in the 1530s, for the great majority of those others who had done so were dead by the time of composition, notably the eighth and ninth earls of Ormond, Robert Cowley and Patrick Finglas.
The ‘Matters’ are significant for reasons other than the potential extent of collaboration in its authorship by prominent advocates of the forward strategy, for the content points towards an increasing preoccupation with the midlands along with south Leinster. The ‘Matters’ were principally concerned with laying charges of corruption against St Leger, but this issue aside, the primary focus of the document was overwhelmingly on the O’Connors and the O’Mores, with frequent mention also of the lordships of Wicklow and Carlow.Footnote 101 Indeed one of the concluding articles in the ‘Matters’ could not have more succinctly expressed the manner in which the preferred strategy of those who had favoured military intervention in Leinster had evolved from the 1530s. Here it was asked ‘Whether the kingis maiestie for all his chargs hathe gotten any p[ro]fight amonge Irishemen: or is in any securitie of the realme befor Ochonor, Omore, and the residew of Leynster be duely reformed’.Footnote 102 The inference was clear. Not only was south Leinster to be reduced, but it was now imperative that intervention also be undertaken in the midlands’ lordships of the O’Connors and O’Mores.
If the ‘Matters’ was drawn up for the purposes of having St Leger removed from the viceregal office it fulfilled its purpose. Bellingham returned to court where a decision was taken in January 1548 that he should replace St Leger as Irish viceroy. Upon taking up his position in Ireland in May he immediately led a military campaign into the midlands, where Fort Protector was established at Ballyadams in the O’More lordship as a counterpart to Fort Governor at Daingean in Offaly.Footnote 103 Thus, the aggressive intervention in the midlands urged by Brabazon and Alen in their policy papers of the previous two years was quickly initiated following St Leger’s removal from office.
A final crucial link between developments in the midlands and the campaign to reduce south Leinster in the 1530s is found in an ‘Offer’ made by a group of twenty-three individuals in 1550.Footnote 104 Numerous studies have traced the origins of the plantation of the midlands to this document in which a grant of Laois was sought, in return for which the group offered to undertake the plantation of the region.Footnote 105 Interestingly they sought a number of castles and manors as strong points for garrisons, notably Carlow and the manor of Monasterevin. As such they argued for the extension of the garrison network which had already been undertaken with the establishment of Fort Protector and Fort Governor and which increasingly mirrored what had been recommended for south Leinster since the 1530s. But the most significant aspect of the proposal concerns the signatories. At the very top of the list of twenty-three names were those of Gerald Aylmer and Thomas Luttrell. Of those who had campaigned for the reduction of Leinster in the 1530s, and who were still alive in 1550, Aylmer and Luttrell were the two most prominent Old Englishmen. Thus, as well as being favoured by New English officials such as Brabazon and Alen, land confiscation in those parts of Leinster adjoining the Pale continued to be a prominent concern for senior Old English politicians from the 1530s through to the formal undertaking of the midlands plantation in the 1550s.
VIII
The origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland remains a contentious issue. Moreover in recent years it has been suggested that it occurred almost by accident, and was a regrettable outcome of a much more benign attempt to ‘reform’ Ireland through conciliatory measures. This argument, following Bradshaw’s thesis, has been made most forcefully for the years immediately following the Kildare Rebellion. It is argued here that the archival evidence suggests something far different. The great majority of the most senior officials in Ireland, from both within the Old English and New English communities, in the weeks and months after the rebellion ended actually began petitioning for the introduction of a programme of coercive regional conquest of Gaelic Ireland beginning in south Leinster with the lordships of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs. Henry VIII refused to undertake this, not on any ideological grounds, but simply because he was unwilling to finance such a costly endeavour. As a result a cheap conciliatory method of governing Ireland was developed. Known as ‘surrender and regrant’ it was applied briefly between late 1540 and 1543. It did not dominate the period and little was written in favour of it. Conversely officials continued to write frequently in support of a strategy of regional conquest in south Leinster and increasingly for the midlands counties also. In 1546 a coalition of the most strident advocates of such a strategy were able to initiate such a programme by invading the midlands counties of Laois and Offaly. Thereafter a concerted effort to conquer the region was undertaken through the establishment of regional garrisons which later evolved into settlements in the first Tudor plantation in Ireland. Given all this it seems scarcely credible to suggest, as Brendan Bradshaw has, that the period was one in which ‘Ireland emerged … with a new constitutional status, as a sovereign kingdom under the crown’, and with ‘a new ideology of nationalism … which aspired to unite Gaelic and Anglo-Irish alike in common devotion to the native land’.Footnote 106 It should properly be understood as one in which a strategy of conquest was developed by both New English and Old English officials and eventually implemented from 1546 onwards, to which date the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland can be traced.Footnote 107
