The Revolt of Silken Thomas and the Fall of the House of Kildare
Realising that the most powerful family in Ireland at that time were the Fitzgeralds, the Earls of Kildare, Henry summoned Gearoid Og (son of already mentioned Gearoid Mor, the
de facto High King Henry VII had grudgingly installed) to London and imprisoned him in the Tower. However the Englishman sent to Ireland to replace him found it an impossible task, and Gearoid Og returned home in triumph, but was summoned back to London in 1534, and this time died there. Before he left for England though, wary of the king and remembering his previous treatment, Gearoid Og left his son Thomas, Lord Offaly, in charge, warning him to ignore any summons to England and to be on his guard against the Irish Council, whom Gearoid did not trust. Thomas, Lord Offaly, is known to history as Silken Thomas.
Mindful of his father’s cautions, Silken Thomas - so called due to the finery he was purported to wear - rode to Dublin and crashed a meeting of the Irish Council, slamming down the ceremonial sword of office that marked him as vice deputy in front of the lord chancellor, and declaring his opposition to the Crown. He then massed his troops, demanding all Englishmen be expelled from Ireland and calling for allegiance to the Pope, in the process hoping for aid from Rome and from Spain, but none arrived. Once again, however, it was not the English who defeated an Irish revolt but in-fighting and score-settling among the Irish themselves. Jealous of the power of the Kildares, the Butlers saw a chance to break that dynasty and fought against Silken Thomas’s army, defeating him and sending him to England, where he was executed in 1537.
Enraged at the revolt, and sensing also a chance to break the power of the Kildares forever, with Gearoid Og and his son both dead, Henry sent a sizeable army - somewhere in the region of around two thousand men - to lay siege to the stronghold of the Kildares, Maynooth Castle, his army bringing with them artillery, the first time this had been used in Ireland. The outcome was a foregone conclusion, and the defeat of the most powerful family in Ireland was quickly accomplished. Worried that their tacit support for the rebellion might anger the king, the Irish lords moved quickly to confirm Henry as Head of the Church of Ireland.
The Kingdom of Ireland
Having no choice but to send settlers to colonise Ireland and thus regain control of the lawless land, Henry used a practice called “surrender and regrant”. What this meant was that the Irish lords would surrender their lands to the Crown, who would grant them back to them, under multiple conditions. First, and most importantly, they must swear fealty to Henry and renounce the authority of the Pope. Second, they must take English peerage titles and abandon their traditional Irish titles. They had to attend parliament, speak English and undertake English customs, live by English laws and encourage the spread of the same throughout their holdings.
In return they would be granted a royal charter to confirm their ownership of the lands, and the protection of the Crown. In 1541 Ireland was declared a kingdom, no longer just a lordship as it had been, and all its inhabitants considered subject to the English Crown. In some ways though it would be separate, with its own House of Lords and House of Commons, and its own courts. The Church of Ireland was established as the state church under Henry, and the dissolution of the monasteries was passed by a compliant Irish parliament. Nevertheless, for all their subservience, the Irish people never acceded to Protestantism and the Reformation in Ireland was pretty much a failure.
Three’s Not Company: Political Factions in Ireland
Around this time then you had three separate social and ethnic groups in Ireland, who are designated as a) the Old English, who were descendants of the original Norman settlers, b) the Old Irish, no explanation needed there and c) the New English, the settlers who arrived during Henry’s reign. Of these three groups, only the last took to the Reformation, being not only staunch Protestants but also Puritans, the toughest, most uncompromising and most hardline opponents of Catholicism (it was of course these who would later sail away from persecution in the seventeenth century to find a new life in a new world, as they departed aboard the Mayflower, bound for America, where they would become the Founding Fathers of that embryonic nation). Both the Old English and Irish clung to their old religion, devoted to the Pope, the former the richest of the three groups while also possessing the most land.
Hatred would of course erupt between the New English and their other counterparts, both English and Irish, but in 1542 the Counter-Reformation was underway and Jesuit and Franciscan monks arrived in Ireland to minister to the population, bolster the observance of the Catholic faith, and ensure forever the defeat of the Reformation in Ireland, a momentous event that left our tiny island unique in being ruled by a Protestant monarch but practicing our own religion.
The death of King Henry VIII would allow his son, Edward, to succeed him as Edward VI, but this was at age nine, and so for his six-year reign power would be in the hands of his regents the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland. A sickly lad, he would die in 1553. England would thereafter experience fifty years of female monarchy, as the first woman to officially sit on the English throne would avenge her father’s persecution of Catholics by reversing the trend, while her sister, succeeding her, would become one of the most famous rulers in English history, and practice a more lenient attitude towards the worship of her subjects. Both would, however, impact negatively upon the history of Ireland, which would stubbornly refuse to bend the knee to the English Crown, and would pay a heavy price for her disobedience and rebellion.
Bloody Mary - Mary I (1553-1558)
Anxious that his Catholic sister Mary should not ascend the throne and undo all the reforms he and their father had instigated, Edward named Lady Jane Grey in his will, a cousin once removed, but she lasted a mere nine days after the young king’s death, when she too was put to death and Mary was crowned Queen of England and Ireland. How the Irish must have celebrated, overjoyed that a Catholic now sat on the English throne! Sadly for us, it made no difference. Mary was as unfeeling towards the “troublesome Irish” as had been her predecessors, and she went ahead with the plantation of the counties of Offaly and Laois, closest to the areas outside the Pale, determined to Anglicise Ireland once and for all.
Mary attained her dark sobriquet, however, not due to her persecution of the Irish but of her own countrymen, the Protestants of England. Once the ruling class and favoured state religion for over forty years, these were now urged to recant their beliefs or be burned at the stake for heresy, a threat she put into horrible practice. Although Mary was married to the Spanish King Philip II, he was not proclaimed as King of England, merely
jure uxoris, a kind of “queen’s consort” title for a male, sort of like I assume, had America a female president, her husband would be, what, First Gentleman? Also something similar, maybe, to the position Prince Albert occupied when married to Queen Victoria later. Anyway, Philip was never King of England, merely the husband of the Queen. The close involvement, however, of the Spanish king allowed Mary to repair the relationship with Rome which had fractured under her father’s reign, and England came once again under the jurisdiction of the Pope. Tellingly though, the monasteries seized by Henry VIII were
not returned to the Church.
Mary was a cruel woman. Even after he recanted his faith, having watched his brother bishops being burned alive, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was forced to go to the stake too. The burnings of what would later become Protestant martyrs were highly unpopular, even among the Spanish, but Mary persisted with the persecution and burning of Protestants until her death in 1558.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
Surely one of the most famous and celebrated of England’s monarchs, and the second woman (discounting Matilda in the far past and Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day reign) to occupy the English throne, Elizabeth banished forever the idea of pure male succession in England. From her reign on (well, from Mary’s, but that was so relatively short and fraught with anger and fear that it didn’t do much to sweeten the people’s attitude towards a Queen) both men and women could be expected to rule if their claim was legitimate. Speaking of which, Elizabeth, as the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whose marriage to Henry had been annulled by the Pope, was seen as illegitimate, and proclaimed as such by Pope Pius V. More, he pronounced her a heretic, and called for all Catholics to rise up against her and overthrow her, calling her “the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime”. He also warned that any Catholics who obeyed her or swore allegiance to her risked excommunication, absolving them from their loyalty to her and encouraging them to support her rival, Mary Queen of Scots.
In the event, the attempts by Mary’s Scottish and French supporters to dethrone or indeed assassinate Elizabeth all failed, and Mary was executed, leaving Elizabeth as the unchallenged Queen of England, and the Pope as a lasting enemy as she confirmed Protestantism as the state religion. Unlike her sister and predecessor, however, Elizabeth did not force her subjects to conform to her own religion, and allowed them to worship as they saw fit, once they swore loyalty to the Crown.
Which is, of course, where Ireland once again comes in.
Although Elizabeth took a much less hardline approach to religion than had Mary or Edward, or her father before them, she had no patience with those who tried to convert Protestants to the Catholic faith in order to draw them away from their allegiance to her, fulfilling Pius’s edict, and the missionaries that arrived in England to do just that were hunted, persecuted and executed. This naturally did not go down well in Ireland, and though Elizabeth herself, who disparagingly referred to Ireland as “that barbarous and rude country”, declared no harm would come to the Irish, she turned a blind eye (or gave tacit, plausible deniability-like approval) to the efforts of her commanders there to put down the many rebellions that sprung up against her rule, and indeed, between rival Irish families, as it had ever done.
Blood Ties, Bloodshed and Blood Oaths: Rivalries in Ireland
Two of the then most powerful Houses in Ireland were the Ormonds and the Desmonds in the south. After a failed rebellion by the Desmond Fitzgeralds in 1573, their leader, James Fitzmaurice, sailed to Europe in search of Catholic support to overthrow the heathen English. This gave the new pope, Gregory XIII, the chance to sow mischief for the heretic queen, and he promised 1000 men, at the head of whom James Fitzmaurice landed near Dingle in Kerry, bearing papal letters that exhorted the Irish and the Irish lords to defy the queen and rise up against her in the name of Rome and the Catholic faith.
Unfortunately, the pope’s men were easily outnumbered by the English forces, and they were trapped and massacred. A terrible revenge ensued, as Elizabeth’s commanders carried out a scorched-earth policy, reducing the south to a smoking wasteland as famine walked the land, all cattle and livestock having been slaughtered by the English in addition to the wholesale murder of the populace. This defeat and the ravaging of their earldom put paid to the Fitzgeralds of Munster, and like their cousins the Earls of Kildare under Henry VIII, their power was forever broken. Their lands were confiscated by the Crown and given to English settlers, as the policy of plantation took hold, something that would continue to be the English answer to subduing Ireland over the next few centuries.
Across the border though, things were very different. For anyone who may know something of Irish history and/or geography, it should be pointed out that at this time all of Ireland was one: the division we have today which created Northern Ireland and the Republic was a long way away, and the entire island of Ireland was one country, under Irish control. Ulster, the northern province, had resisted the English more fiercely than its southern cousins, and Elizabeth found it hard to break them, as almost all of Ulster was still Irish. In addition, there were no maps the English could follow that showed them what lay beyond what we now know of here as the border: none had been made, and none were encouraged obviously. Ulster was, to the English,
terra incognita, as unknown and wildly terrifying as Darkest Africa - and probably as dangerous.
The ruling family in Ulster was the O’Neills, and The O’Neill was Shane, who brooked no opposition to his rule, striking from his stronghold of Tyrone and demanding fealty from every other lord. English expeditions who ventured into Ulster typically became lost, then ambushed, and were never heard from again. In an effort to come to a compromise with Shane, the queen invited him to London, where he was made a Captain of Tyrone, but on his return, as he attacked other lordships, he was defeated by an alliance of his enemies and killed. However, his successor would go on to be one of the most famous and dangerous men in Irish history.