The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (27 page)

No lord since the high kings had held such power as Kildare. The 8th and 9th Earls had mastery of much of Ireland through their possession of great lands, their numerous tenantry, their command of soldiers, and their networks of clients, including many Gaelic lords around the Pale and far beyond. The rental book of Kildare in 1518 listed twenty-four
Gaelic chiefs who paid him tribute. The 8th Earl’s constant campaigning throughout the island left the lords in no doubt of Kildare power. ‘Some sayeth,’ it was reported in 1515, that there had never been such peace in 300 years; ‘that the Irish enemies was never more adread of the king’s Deputy than they be now.’ The 8th Earl had exercised seemingly unlimited power in County Kildare, which he administered as a liberty, its officials appointed by him, its law either English or Irish, as the case required. There he imposed coyne and livery, but with the vital difference that it was by consent. The earls of Kildare were the extreme examples of English marcher lords, potentially overmighty and with the closest associations with English enemies in the ‘land of war’. But they never doubted that their power and honour rested in their royal office. They neither wanted nor sought the independence of a Gaelic paramount chief. The 9th Earl wrote to Henry VIII, whom he had served in their youth at the English court, protesting an allegiance which, if it ever failed, ‘should be the destruction of me and my sequel for ever’.

In 1520 O’Donnell warned that if Henry VIII gave the office of chief governor to Kildare again, he might as well resign the lordship of Ireland to the Fitzgeralds forever. In 1522–4 Piers Butler, 8th Earl of Ormond was made chief governor, but only for a time, because he lacked the military and financial resources to discharge the duties with which he was entrusted, and because a sulking Kildare used his power to obstruct his rival. Ormond’s failure and replacement by Kildare in 1524 left a legacy of hostility to disturb the peace of the lordship. The intrigues of Kildare’s Fitzgerald kinsman, the 11th Earl of Desmond, with Francis I of France, allowed Ormond to impute treasonable communication with the King’s enemies to Kildare also. In 1526 both Ormond and Kildare were summoned to court, leaving Gaelic borderers to raid the Englishry. Two years later Ormond returned to Ireland, but Kildare was detained. Meanwhile, O’Connor of Offaly ran riot, not without Kildare’s collusion. That year Kildare came very close to being charged with treason.

Now and throughout the century factional rivalry within Irish politics was closely enmeshed with alignments at court in England. Kildare was restored yet again as chief governor in 1532, partly through the favour of the Duke of Norfolk, who was not only concerned to protect his own Ormond inheritance against the Butlers, but saw in Kildare the best hope of peace in Ireland. But Kildare’s rivals, Archbishop Alen of Dublin and the Butlers, were in communication with Thomas Cromwell, who was taking a closer interest in Ireland, an interest that was regarded
with the deepest suspicion by Kildare. In September 1533 Kildare was summoned to England once more. His countess went, but he stayed and began marshalling ordnance. Late that year Cromwell’s memorandum noted: ‘to adhere as many of the great Irish rebels as is possible’; and ‘to withstand all other practices that might be practised there’, where ‘practice’ meant conspiracy. In February 1534 Kildare arrived in England, leaving his son, Thomas, Lord Offaly (‘Silken Thomas’) to rule in his absence. Three months later ‘manifold enormities’ were proved against Kildare, and a message came to Offaly from his father, telling him to ‘play the best or gentlest part’ and not to trust the Council. On 11 June 1534 Offaly marched through Dublin to the Council, denounced the King’s policies, yielded his sword of office, and signalled Geraldine (Fitzgerald) resistance. Archbishop Alen was murdered, Dublin Castle besieged.

This was rebellion from a feudatory of the Crown, rebellion not from desperation but from overweening confidence. The Geraldines could not believe that any English government could replace their grand networks of alliance and power, nor that any policy could be pursued which they opposed. Presented with moderate proposals for reform, they revolted. This rebellion, like every rebellion in sixteenth-century Ireland thereafter, claimed a religious motive, although no changes in religion had yet been effected there. Lord Thomas began to call up that great ‘knot of all the forces of Ireland’ which were ‘twisted under his girdle’: Conor O’Brien of Thomond in Munster, Fitzgerald of Desmond, Conn Bacach O’Neill in Ulster, O’Connor of Offaly. The revolt was a desperate miscalculation. Even the forces of Kildare and his allies could not withstand a Tudor campaign army, and the promised forces from Emperor Charles V never came. Seventy-five of the revolt’s leaders were executed. The ascendancy of the Fitzgeralds was shattered, their slantyaght leaderless, their great lands confiscated. This was a disaster not for the Fitzgeralds alone but for all the lords of Ireland, for the destruction of the House of Kildare destroyed also the fragile equilibrium and peace which their supremacy had intermittently assured. As the English governors now stumbled erratically towards alternative ways of ruling the lordship, the Gaelic lords entered new alliances to replace the old, and politics became ever more volatile, until finally a radical estrangement appeared between the two worlds of Englishry and Irishry.

As Henry VIII asserted his imperial authority in England, he thought to extend it to his lordship of Ireland also. A corpus of Reformation
legislation was enacted in the Irish Parliament in 1536–7. The King was constituted ‘the only Supreme Head in earth of the whole Church of Ireland’, and granted spiritual jurisdiction over the Irish religious communities. 1537 saw the dissolution of a few of them. Their own spiritual malaise and morbidity, their virtual ruination and abandonment were reasons for their demise. So, too, was the evidence that some of the religious had, in their support for the Geraldine rebels, revealed their higher loyalty to local lords than to their king. The attainder of Kildare and his adherents, and the confiscation of Geraldine and monastic lands allowed the Crown to boost its revenues and to distribute patronage. Sir Patrick Finglas, the Anglo-Irish Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, had proposed a scheme in
c
. 1534 to ‘
plant
young lords and gents out of England’ in dissolved monastic possessions in the turbulent borderlands south of Dublin. His moderate scheme was not implemented, but it was the forerunner of increasingly aggressive proposals for the settlement and plantation of people. Many who pondered how Ireland might be reformed – and who had read their Roman history – came to believe that the establishment of plantations or colonies would have the strategic and moral imperative of advancing English law and custom, and of reminding the Irish lords of their altered obligations in the new Irish Kingdom. With plantation would come a new breed of English in Ireland; migrants not born in Ireland, who came to settle, to plant, and to exploit it – the New English.

The replacement of the pope by the king of England as Head of the Church at first met little resistance. That quiescence was temporary. The Friars Observants (‘Friars obstinates’) offered a campaign of passive resistance. The final surrender of religious houses in the Crown territories took place between the summer of 1539 and the summer of 1540. This followed an assault in the winter of 1538–9 upon images, shrines, places of pilgrimage and of popular devotion. The annalist of Loch Cé lamented that ‘there was not a holy cross, a statue of the Virgin, nor a venerable image within their [the Crown’s] jurisdiction that they did not destroy’. An air of apocalyptic foreboding pervaded the Pale. But in the territories of the Gaelic lords – in Munster, Connacht and Ulster – the suppression campaigns did not advance. The friars maintained their traditional ways with impunity, ‘using the old popish sort’. Later, the very association of Reformation with the English monarch became an added reason to oppose it. The campaign for suppression coincided with a revolt of Irish lords of unprecedented menace. Their cause could easily
be identified with the threat to the old religion, and a Gaelic revolt with political ends could be presented as religious crusade.

The failure of the Geraldine rebellion had left the old system of dynastic alliances in disarray, but not destroyed. The lords were never so fearful, never so individually vulnerable, but their local power was intact, and together they constituted so formidable a force that no Tudor army could easily suppress them. Great Gaelic lords like O’Reilly, O’Neill and O’Donnell could field more horsemen than the king’s chief governor. With the old alliances disrupted, the lords were volatile and dangerous as they waited to exploit the opportunities offered by the Geraldine desolation, and made novel alliances with former enemies. They would not easily submit to Tudor overlordship. MacCarthy Reagh defied the Crown: ‘What he has won with his sword, he will hold with his sword.’ In Ulster, O’Neill and his underlords remained hostile, and the new O’Donnell, Manus, was as extravagant in his claims as in his talents. The septs of Leinster – the O’Connors, O’Mores and Kavanaghs – waited their moment to prey upon the Pale. In Connacht the Mayo Burkes, the O’Connors of Sligo and the O’Malleys held out, still unsubdued. In the western lordship of Thomond in Munster the O’Briens gave sanctuary to Geraldine refugees. A band of Geraldine followers, bound by ‘kindred, marriage and fostering’, longed ‘more to see a Geraldine to triumph than to see God come amongst them’. The hopes of all those ‘branded at the heart with a G’ rested with Lord Offaly’s half-brother, ‘Young Gerald’. He had been spirited to the west of Ireland by his aunt, Lady Eleanor MacCarthy who, now married to Manus O’Donnell, hoped to ally the great Gaelic lords of the north with those of Munster and to restore the Geraldines.

Into this unstable world came Lord Leonard Grey, made chief governor in 1536. Through the following three years he campaigned relentlessly against the Irishry, though with forces so mutinous that he feared them more than he did the Irish. As he turned to conciliate where he could not conquer, he was accused of confederacy with the Irish, of restoring the Geraldine band, with himself at its head. His enemies claimed that he held ‘secret intelligences’ by night with the Irishry; O’Connor of Offaly, the scourge of the Pale, was ‘his right hand, and who but he?’; the O’Neill was his godson; O’More’s sons were his ‘chief darlings’; ‘my Lord Deputy is the Earl of Kildare newly born again’. These charges came from the Earl of Ormond and his followers, whose own hopes to inherit the Geraldine ascendancy were thwarted as the
governors of the colony feared and guarded against another overmighty lord. Grey became dangerously entangled in the old rivalries as he supported the Butlers’ traditional enemies against them. But his strategy of offering protection to those lords who would submit to the Crown, and inflicting retribution on those who would not, might have worked had he been less restless and aggressive.

Now, in retaliation, a novel alliance had formed in this shifting world which was more alarming than any yet. In the late summer of 1539 the War of the Geraldine League broke out. O’Neill and O’Donnell with their Ulster underlords swept down through Louth and Meath, aiming for Tara, where O’Neill intended to be inaugurated high king of Ireland. The Geraldine League confronted the Crown with new dangers: a united Gaelic resistance in the name of the old religion and the papacy, with the prospect of aid from France and Scotland. Friars and priests denounced Henry VIII as ‘the most heretic and worst man in the world’ and promised the rebels that they would go to heaven if they died in that cause. ‘Mortal enemies’ – O’Connor of Sligo and O’Donnell; O’Donnell and O’Neill – were now sworn one to another. O’Brien would not make a truce with Ormond, for O’Neill, O’Connor and the O’Tooles were ‘his Irishmen whom he intendeth to defend’. The League survived into 1540, despite its defeat at Bellahoe on the Ulster border, and was overcome not by Tudor military power, but by the diplomacy and patronage of Sir Anthony St Leger. Lord Leonard Grey fell in the summer of 1540, a victim of the coup at the English court which brought down Cromwell: St Leger, a client of the Duke of Norfolk, arrived in the autumn to replace him. Young Gerald, ‘the traitor boy’, fled to France, and Geraldine hopes with him.

Conquest by the English Crown through a policy of grants to great Anglo-Irish lords to enable them to win mastery of the island had, over three centuries, failed; conquest by military occupation must fail through lack of resources; conquest by conciliation was the way now devised. In the Parliament held in Dublin in June 1541 Henry VIII was declared, not Lord, but King of Ireland. This was a constitutional change of the greatest consequence. Ireland now had a king who had never been acclaimed, nor anointed, nor ever bound by coronation oath to uphold the shaky liberties of his Irish subjects. The king of Ireland never existed separately from the king of England, and where the interests of the two kingdoms clashed, it would always be those of the king of England which prevailed. The Irish Parliament and the Irish Privy Council, too,
were subordinate to their English counterparts. Ireland was now a kingdom, but it was not an independent sovereign entity. Its own king never visited it; distrusted it; found its ways alien; and denied its autonomy.

Ireland was no longer to be a land of many lordships, but of one. The Act for the Kingly Title provided the statutory basis for the exercise of the King’s jurisdiction in the sovereign Gaelic lordships. The King must make his authority real: his religion, his law, his taxes must be imposed. Any resistance would now be rebellion by subjects, rather than opposition from Irish enemies. Distinctions between the King’s English subjects in Ireland and his former Irish enemies were dissolved. Now both were subject to the same laws, and under his protection if they obeyed them. St Leger proceeded by negotiation and conciliation in an attempt to win over the Gaelic chiefs and to unite the disparate political communities of Ireland in submission and loyalty to the English Crown. His success in overcoming the Gaelic lords’ suspicion of the King’s ambitions for the wealth of their territories was, in the circumstances, considerable. Yet the fate of the suppression campaign was instructive. In the Gaelic territories, the dissolution of the religious houses was a matter for negotiation between St Leger and the lords, and here although ownership may have been transferred from ecclesiastical to secular lords, very many of the houses survived, with the religious still in possession.