Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700

Crawford Gribben, Elizabethanne Boran, Elizabethanne Boran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317143468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in the study of the Reformation period within the three kingdoms of Britain, revolutionizing the way in which scholars think about the relationships between England, Scotland and Ireland. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the story of the British Reformation is still dominated by studies of England, an imbalance that this book will help to right. By adopting an international perspective, the essays in this volume look at the motives, methods and impact of enforcing the Protestant Reformation in Ireland and Scotland. The juxtaposition of these two countries illuminates the similarities and differences of their social and political situations while qualifying many of the conclusions of recent historical work in each country. As well as Investigating what 'reformation' meant in the early modern period, and examining its literal, rhetorical, doctrinal, moral and political implications, the volume also explores what enforcing these various reformations could involve. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a fascinating insight into how the political authorities in Scotland and Ireland attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose Protestantism on their countries. By comparing the two situations, and placing them in the wider international picture, our understanding of European confessionalization is further enhanced.

CHAPTER ONE
Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland

Ciaran Brady and James Murray

The starting point of this chapter lies in an odd dichotomy that has long persisted between the way in which political historians and historians of religion have viewed the course of sixteenth-century Irish history. For the former, the events of the century have long fitted into one essentially simple pattern: that is the sequence of challenge, confrontation, conquest and dispossession, often summarily expressed under the rubric of ‘the Tudor Conquest’ or ‘the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland’. For historians of religion, however, no such simple narrative of completion and success (for the English Crown at least) has been available. Instead they have been obliged to rehearse a rather unsatisfactory account of the defeat of the apparently dominant side, and the curious triumph of the defeated and the dispossessed.¹

The problem entailed by these divergent narratives resides not simply in the inherent paradox that the same agencies which so successfully executed the political and military conquest should have failed so markedly in the cultural or religious aspects of their programme. Or, to put it conversely, the problem is not simply that the native Irish who had failed so manifestly to withstand the encroachments of the English state should have so thoroughly succeeded in building an increasingly strong and unified cultural resistance. A more troubling contradiction confronting historians has been the undeniable fact that the programme of religious reformation was from the outset conceived and designed to be far more moderate, conciliatory and less confrontational than the drive to establish political control. This contrast in the fortunes of the two different programmes – a tough one which succeeded and a soft one which failed – has raised the uncomfortable, almost Spenserian, suggestion that the native Irish would respond only to policies of the most violent and repressive kind that few historians since the nineteenth century would have been willing to contemplate and still less to pursue.² But, likewise, few have been willing to engage directly with this dichotomy, and have preferred rather to pass over the matter in silence.

This simultaneous recognition and refusal to engage has given rise to some discomfort in the writings of Irish historians.³ But underlying and supporting this sustained evasion two different but closely dependent working assumptions may be discerned. The first of these – a comfort to the political historians – has been the simple assertion that the men of action, the governors, judges, soldiers and lawyers, simply did not care about the advance of religious reformation, and that whatever their favoured approaches – be they aggressive and coercive, diplomatic or conciliatory – were all agreed on the primacy of the political over the religious, of reform over reformation, of conquest over conversion; and that while they each pursued their preferred political strategies, they allowed the obligation to enforce the Reformation to languish in the hands of ineffective, treacherous and divided ecclesiastics, until it was too late.⁴

The second working assumption employed by those historians who have actually sought to investigate the operation of these ineffective and divided ecclesiastics has been the belief that the problem of the reformation was essentially a problem of competing strategies derived from opposing ideological and religious positions.⁵ Thus, even when they were let go about their business, the reforming ecclesiastics were themselves deeply divided as to how the Reformation was to be enforced: by preaching, conversion and education (the Word); or by the rigorous enforcement of conformity, by statute, ecclesiastical commission and even persecution (the Sword). And as they struggled among themselves to assert the best strategy for reform, the outcome of their debate was itself rendered irrelevant by the emergence of a powerful and coherent Counter-Reformation resistance.

Together the two interpretative predilections have had the happy effect of allowing the dichotomy between the political and religious to persist unquestioned, as both tended to support the view that the political always predominated in English policy, and that strategies of religious reform were hampered by their own intrinsic divisions. Yet both points of view are afflicted with problems, both evidential and methodological. In the case of the latter, for example, the manner in which evidence for strategic division has been gathered and synthesized over long chronological spans, stretching at times to a century or more, creates obvious problems of assessment. The adoption of similarly broad geographical spans, relating, for example, the attitudes or statements of opinion made, say, in Dublin in the 1530s or Cork in the 1580s with those made in Ulster in the 1640s without sufficient attention to the particular contexts of time, circumstance and event within which they were produced is equally problematic. And perhaps most unsatisfactory of all is the manner in which these disparate expressions of opinion or religious outlook have sometimes been regrouped to fit into abstract taxonomic categories or preconceived models.⁶

More serious, however, than methodological reservations of this kind are the simple evidential objections which apply to the second wing of this interpretative dichotomy – the presumed neglect of the secular men of action. The assumption that the viceroys – the principle agents of English policy in Ireland – disregarded or diminished their responsibility to oversee the introduction of religious reform is largely unfounded. From Lord Leonard Grey in the 1530s to Sir John Perrott in the 1580s, almost all of those who held the vice-regal office took their obligation to the enforcement of the reformation with great seriousness. It was Sir Anthony St Leger, and not Archbishop Browne, who took the initiative in enforcing the first Book of Common Prayer.⁷ It was Sir John Perrott, and not Archbishop Loftus, who insisted upon the enforcement of the oath of supremacy for holders of public office.⁸ Viceroys, like Sir Edward Bellingham and Sir James Crofts in the 1540s and 1550s, frequently bemoaned the lack of support they were receiving in their efforts to enforce conformity.⁹ The Earl of Sussex regarded the re-establishment of the Reformation by statute in 1560 as the principal reason of his resuming office, and it was his successor, Sir Henry Sidney, who, in his elaborate programme devised for the reform of Ireland in 1565, placed the enforcement of the Reformation at the very top of his priorities.¹⁰

The misfit between interpretations of the century from political and religious perspectives is most fully embodied in historians’ accounts of Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland. That he was in general an energetic, forceful and inventive administrator, almost all historians are agreed.¹¹ But how such characteristics affected his attitude toward the development of religious reform is a matter which has produced little consensus. Thus for some his status as an inner member of the Dudley circle has been assumed as being sufficient to identify him with the so-called advanced protestant interest at the English court; while for others Sidney’s friendship with decidedly deviant figures, such as Edmund Campion and Richard Stanyhurst, and his notorious protection of recusants in Wales, has led to the rather opposite view that Sidney was quite cold on religious issues.¹² Such differences in assessment have in large part, however, gone unreconciled, perhaps because neither position can remain entirely comfortable with the first major initiative in regard to advancing the Reformation in Ireland with which he can be credited: his introduction in 1567 of a slightly adapted form of the Eleven Articles of religion drawn up by Archbishop Parker in 1561.¹³

Sidney’s programme of reformation

The significance of Sidney’s decision to promulgate the 1561 articles as the doctrinal and catechetical foundations of the Elizabethan Church of Ireland can easily be underestimated. On the surface it may appear to have been a highly conservative, even timid, move. It seemed already to lag far behind developments in England where, in 1563, the Church of England had settled upon a far more radical statement of its fundamental doctrine in the form of the Thirty-Nine Articles.¹⁴ In contrast to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, with their pungent anti-Roman declarations, their unambiguous endorsement of avowedly protestant theological doctrines such as justification, and their approval of such controversial practices as the clergy’s right to marry, Sidney’s version of Parker’s early compromising position was distinctly mild.¹⁵ For subscription to the Church of Ireland, the new Irish articles merely required from the clergy and laity a general conformity to the royal supremacy and the prayer book services, while at the same time studiously avoiding any definitions of the sacraments or the doctrine of justification. By the same token, their rejection of papal supremacy and the worshipping of images were mild-mannered in tone, and deliberately phrased to avoid causing offence.¹⁶ The decision to ignore the established doctrine of the Church of England and to revert to the Twelve Articles would seem to offer clear evidence that the new viceroy was not prepared to court theological controversy and political confrontation, and that he was instead anxious to achieve consensus on a basic set of religious beliefs that were so conservative in tone as to be likely to win at least nominal acceptance throughout English and Gaelic Ireland alike.

Thus read in isolation, Sidney’s adaptation of the 1561 articles may be seen as a cautiously conservative move. But his initiative acquires a rather more assertive character when set in relation to a whole series of reformist measures with which it was accompanied when Sidney assumed the government of Ireland in 1566. In his elaborate ‘Instructions’ for the revival of the Reformation in Ireland which Sidney himself developed over several drafts throughout 1565, the promulgation of the Twelve Articles was indeed a crucial element, but only one amongst several. Their principal significance, moreover, lay not in their content, but in their form, in their role, that is to say, as part of a much larger programme of propaganda and public dissemination. Among the several elements in this project were printed proclamations justifying policy against Shane O’Neill, the suppression of rebellion in Leinster and Munster, the preparation and publication of a major digest of Irish statutes, and the publication of John Kearney’s Aibidil Gaeilge agus Caiticiosma which, in addition to translating extracts from the Book of Common Prayer and some meditations and prayers selected from John Carswell’s prayer book, contained a full translation into Irish of the Twelve Articles themselves. If the message being broadcast was ostensibly mild, the medium in which it was carried was to be intensely evangelical in its energy.¹⁷

Publication of the good news, however, formed only one part of Sidney’s reformative programme. He had several other, more directly interventionist, plans to implement. He wanted, for example, all the vacant bishoprics and other ecclesiastical dignities throughout the island filled immediately and wanted minor or vacant sees to be amalgamated into larger ones. Thus he personally made nominations for the sees of Dublin, Armagh, Cork, Ferns, Kildare and Down and Connor; he had Emly united with Cashel and Clonmacnoise with Meath; and sought parliamentary sanction for a bill authorizing the Lord Deputy to appoint to ecclesiastical dignities in Munster and Connacht for a period of ten years.¹⁸ Within the dioceses themselves he wanted absentee clergy to surrender their benefices and to have the alienation of clergy of their benefices proscribed.¹⁹ He was determined to see the repair of church fabric and drafted legislation to ensure that both clergy and laity assumed their responsibility in this regard.²⁰ He was also eager to renew and strengthen the ecclesiastical commission in Ireland, the principal tribunal through which the Reformation had been enforced in England after the passing of the acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559; and to this end he recruited Dr Robert Weston, a senior ecclesiastical lawyer and experienced English commissioner, to head it.²¹ Most controversially, he wanted the cathedral of St Patrick’s to be dissolved, to have its chapter house converted to the use of the governor and council, and to have its extensive rents employed to defray the costs of the garrison and to pay off the army’s debt to the country.²²

Though his proposals for St Patrick’s may seem to run directly contrary to his plans for ecclesiastical renewal, an important underlying consistency can be found in Sidney’s particular approach to the troubled cathedral. He was by no means the first to recommend its dissolution. But his plans for the cathedral certainly differed markedly from previous reformist suggestions that its confiscated wealth should be used for the establishment of an endowment for a university.²³ Sidney’s outlook was altogether more radical. As well as offering much needed relief to the inhabitants of the Pale and improving thereby the popularity and authority of his government, the pensioning off of the cathedral’s prebendaries would remove one of the principal sources of resistance to change which the reformers had encountered since the initiation of the religious change under Henry VIII. But, even more importantly, Sidney had clear and very different views on the manner in which an Irish university should be founded. For him, the university was best established neither by the dissolution of a cathedral, nor by private endowment, but by means of statute, which he envisaged was to originate in a motion arising voluntarily in the Irish House of Commons that such a bill might be drafted and made law. An Irish university, seminary for the Irish Reformation, would then be founded in precisely the same way as the Irish church had been established, as a national institution sanctioned by an act of the Irish Parliament.²⁴

Propaganda, diocesan reorganization, clerical reform, the refurbishment of churches and the establishment of a university can now all be seen not as a set of separate initiatives but as elements of a coherent reformation strategy. And when viewed in this manner, it becomes evident that Sidney’s approach to the problem of advancing th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland
• 2 Printing in Early Seventeenth-Century Dublin: Combating Heresy in Serpentine Times
• 3 The Problem of ‘Scottish Puritanism’, 1590–1638
• 4 ‘Force and Fear of Punishment’: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603–33
• 5 The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament, 1639–51: The Rule of the Godly and the ‘Second Scottish Reformation’
• 6 Robert Leighton, Edinburgh Theology and the Collapse of the Presbyterian Consensus
• 7 Godly Order: Enforcing Peace in the Irish Reformation
• 8 Enforcing the Reformation in Ireland, 1660–1704
• 9 Conformity and Security in Scotland and Ireland, 1660–85
• Index