Church of Ireland

Church of Ireland, the largest Protestant church in Ireland. From 1537 to 1870 it was the established state church, governed by the English monarch. Since disestablishment in 1870, it has been an independent self‐governing church, a member of the worldwide Anglican communion.

In theory, the Act of Supremacy of 1537 meant that the Church of Ireland ‘took over’ the pre‐Reformation church structure and subjected it to royal control. In practice the transition from pre‐Reformation to reformed church was much more complicated, for two reasons. First, the authority of the king in the 16th century was limited to the Pale and the Anglo‐Irish areas of the country. In the Gaelic areas, far away from Dublin, the papal church continued for most of the 16th century uninterrupted. Second, even within the Church of Ireland, formal adherence to royal supremacy was, for many clergy and laity, perfectly compatible with thoroughly traditional Catholic religious practices and beliefs. Anglo‐Irish Catholic ‘survivalism’, both within and outside the Church of Ireland, was a very powerful conservative religious force in the 16th century. Equally, the power of church and state to impose uniformity through civil and ecclesiastical discipline was limited by the ineffectiveness of legal structures and the unwillingness of the English authorities to sanction rigorous enforcement for fear of alienating the local population. Clear distinctions between the Church of Ireland and the Catholic church are as a result difficult to formulate. Even the Twelve Articles of 1567—the first formulation of the church's faith—were general and inclusive, much less detailed than the English Thirty‐Nine Articles.

This confused identity of the Church of Ireland began to change in the reigns of Elizabeth (1558–1603) and James (1603–25). First there was the exodus of Anglo‐Irish from the established church: increasingly in the 1570s and 1580s they opted for recusancy, refusing to attend official services and instead identifying with the Counter‐Reformation Catholic church. At the same time English leaders of the Church of Ireland, most notably Archbishop Adam Loftus of Dublin, sought to ensure that the church adopted a more firmly Protestant theological position. The fruits of this increasing confessionalization were evident in the early 17th century, when the Church of Ireland episcopate was extended to every diocese in Ireland, and its ministry transformed by the influx of committed Protestant clergy from England and Scotland, reinforced by ordinands trained in Trinity College, Dublin. Thus in 1575, out of fifteen royally appointed bishops, three were English and the rest native Irish or Anglo‐Irish; by 1603, six were English‐born and ten Irish or Anglo‐Irish; by 1625 there were fifteen English bishops, five Scots, and only three native Irish or Anglo‐Irish. Two signs of the new self‐awareness were the 104 articles of religion adopted by the Irish convocation in 1615, which extended and amended the English Thirty‐Nine Articles in a more distinctively Calvinist direction, and the historical work of James Ussher, which sought to establish the non‐Roman character of the Celtic Irish church. The distinctive independent polity which the Church of Ireland created in the first three decades of the 17th century enabled it to employ puritans from England and Presbyterians from Scotland who could not be accommodated by their national churches.

The creation of a firmly Protestant Church of Ireland was not paralleled by the conversion of the Irish population. Its pastorate concentrated upon the English and Scottish settlers and officials, to the exclusion of native Irish and Anglo‐Irish parishes and dioceses. The influx of English clergy confirmed this trend towards an Anglicized church. Only in exceptional cases, such as that of William Bedell, did Church of Ireland ministers embrace the idea of preaching Protestantism to the Irish people in their own language. The church, however, did not abandon the goal of spreading Protestantism: the church leaders were firmly committed to the imposition of conformity throughout Ireland by the exercise of the Act of Uniformity. The problem (as they saw it) was that the state repeatedly proved unwilling to use to the full the machinery of the civil law to force Catholic recusants to attend church.

From 1633, under the direction of Lord Deputy Wentworth, Archbishop Laud of Canterbury, and Bishop Bramhall of Derry, there was a dual shift of policy. First, attention shifted from penalizing recusants to reforming the church itself. Bramhall and Wentworth made the perfectly valid point that the church was severely handicapped by a shortage of resources: ministers were poorly trained, benefices impoverished, churches ruined, and church lands detained by laymen. Using the powers of the government and of the High Commission to the full, they set about restoring the church's fortunes. Second, they sought to curb the tendency within the Church of Ireland towards independence: in convocation in 1634 the Irish church was made to adopt the Thirty‐Nine Articles, together with stricter disciplinary canons, designed to exclude puritans and Presbyterians from its ministry. This was followed by a purge of nonconformist clergy in the Presbyterian strongholds in Ulster.

The fall of Wentworth in 1640–1, and the start of the Confederate War, began a period of turmoil and uncertainty. English Protestant clergy were a particular target of the native Irish in the rising of 1641: some were murdered, and many forced to flee. Following the victory of the English parliamentary forces, the Church of Ireland, though not legally disestablished, was deprived of the marks of establishment. The Cromwellian regime prohibited the use of the Book of Common Prayer, substituting the more puritan Directory of Worship, and took control of the two Dublin cathedrals and Trinity College. While some clergy went into exile or retirement, many served in the rather ill‐defined state church thus created. Time did not, however, allow for the fulfilment of ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, plans for educational development, nor for the pastoral revitalization that was intended to result from a wide‐ranging survey of the church carried out during the Interregnum.

The convention of 1660 included a substantial dissenting element, and a return to episcopacy was not initially to be taken for granted. However, the general mood of conservatism produced by the disorders of the preceding 20 years ensured majority support for the restoration of the pre‐1641 establishment. On 27 January 1661 twelve bishops were consecrated to fill vacancies caused by death or deprivation.

Under the initial leadership of John Bramhall, archbishop of Armagh 1661–3, the convocation of 1661–6 addressed major tasks of reconstruction, including the disciplining or removal of dissenting ministers who had taken office in the church, particularly in the north, during the Commonwealth. The 1666 Act of Uniformity strengthened the hands of disciplinary bishops. Absenteeism, plurality, ruined churches, and non‐existent glebes remained part of the picture. But there was also a renewed attention to pastoral care. The preaching and writing of Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down and Dromore 1661–7, contributed intellectual activity of the highest order, while others revived an interest in liturgical matters that was a marked feature of the Caroline period. There were daily services in many churches in Dublin and other towns, and eucharistic practice gained fresh emphasis.

Scarcely had the established church settled back into its role than it was to undergo a further period of turbulence as James II made clear his intention to promote the interests of Catholicism. Having initially extended a wary welcome to him, the Church of Ireland quickly came to understand that its prerogatives were at risk. Although several bishops responded to his summons to attend the ‘patriot parliament’, the incidence of non‐jurors was negligible, as compared with the situation in England, and some of the church's leaders, including William King, even envisaged a post‐Revolution settlement that would come to terms with dissent.

Such theological compromise was not required, though the church felt anything but secure. The 18th century, commonly perceived as a period of unchallengeable Anglican hegemony, was by no means experienced as such by contemporary church leaders. Certainly, the dangers posed by a supposedly subversive Toryism among the high‐church clergy had passed by 1714, the Catholics were contained by the penal laws, and dissent (with its uncomfortably large number of adherents) was severely constrained by the sacramental test. Furthermore, in prelates such as Hugh Boulter and George Stone the interests of church and state seemed finally to have coalesced. Yet throughout the century there were voices that were far from complacent. William King questioned not only the morality of the penal laws, but also their efficacy in promoting religious change. Others who sought more constructive means of strengthening Protestantism included John Richardson, the advocate of evangelization through Irish, and Henry Maule, bishop of Dromore 1732–44, whose attempts to provide free schooling for the Catholic and Protestant poor laid the foundations for the charter schools.

Archbishop King and, later in the century, Richard Woodward, while strenuously defending the raison d'être of the established church, castigated those clergy who by their neglect of duty weakened its position, and the wealthy laity who resisted the imposition of tithes. A century that began with an alarming House of Lords report on the State of Popery (1731) drew to a close with equally alarming Catholic pressure for concessions that government sought to assuage by a series of Catholic Relief Acts.

By the Act of Union, the churches of England and Ireland were united ‘for ever’ (in fact, 70 years). But the influence of the Irish episcopate in the British House of Lords was a shadow of what it had been in Dublin, and the diminishing power of the Church of Ireland to influence (and, in particular, to reverse) government policy soon became obvious.

Reform in the early 19th century came from more than one source. William Stuart, archbishop of Armagh 1800–22, and Charles Brodrick, archbishop of Cashel 1801–22, both deplored the inefficiencies that exposed the church to criticism of its privileges, both inside and outside parliament, and zealously sought to remove abuses that inhibited its pastoral mission. The early decades of the 19th century also saw a widespread evangelical movement, not always espoused by the hierarchy, that sought by preaching and philanthropy to promote religious zeal. Where such commitment extended to the attempted conversion of the Catholic population (see second reformation), the result was to inflame sectarian animosities still further. Yet reform of the church from within was too little and too late to satisfy the demands of parliamentary and other critics. Though achievements were far from negligible, especially where the building of the ubiquitous ‘first fruits’ churches was concerned, it became increasingly difficult, in the political climate of the age, to defend the scale of the church's endowments when set against its de facto constituency (and, indeed, its performance). The radical policies of the Whig government of the 1830s (the Church Temporalities Act, reform of tithes, rejection of the church's demand for control of the new national schools) initiated an erosion of status that culminated with disestablishment in 1869.

A much slimmed‐down institution emerged from the process, perhaps just in time to meet the challenges posed by the political upheavals that gave birth to the separate jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Like other Irish churches since the partitioning of the island, the Church of Ireland has maintained its pastoral and administrative unity. But while the Representative Church Body is based in Dublin, where also the General Synod usually meets, three‐quarters of the church's members (in 1991 279,280 out of a total of 368,467) live in Northern Ireland. Numerical decline in the south and west, discernible long before partition, was hastened by several factors: emigration (or migration north for political reasons), disproportionate losses of young men in the First World War, and the Roman Catholic church's rules governing the upbringing of the children of mixed marriages (see ne temere).

Several generations have grown up in the transformed political, social, and religious environment created by partition. The northern members of the church have found themselves part of what has sometimes appeared to be a beleaguered unionist majority. The southern members, after a difficult initial period in a Free State that clearly sought to identify itself with Catholic social teaching and Gaelic culture, showed increasing confidence as what is now the Republic of Ireland became more pluralist.

Bibliography

Ford, A., McGuire, J. I., and Milne, K. (eds.), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (1995)
Murray, James, et al., ‘The Church of Ireland: A Critical Bibliography 1536–1992’, Irish Historical Studies, 28/112 (1993)

Alan Ford/ and Kenneth Milne