Reformation

Reformation. The European Reformation of the 16th century was an immensely complex phenomenon. Beginning in 1517 as Martin Luther's theological challenge to the orthodoxy of the later medieval Catholic church, based upon the primacy of justification by faith and the Bible, it developed into a widespread reform movement. It was soon sucked into the vortex of diplomacy and politics, as kings and princes sought to impose religious uniformity upon their subjects and exploit the Reformation for their own ends. Finally, it became inextricably linked to the changing social and economic circumstances of the transition from medieval to early modern Europe.

Each country was unique in the way these forces combined. In England, secular issues predominated: it was Henry VIII's desire for a divorce which led him to break with the papacy. In Ireland, similarly, the Reformation was initially a product of dynastic politics, imposed on those areas of the country subject to the English king. But, though the English Reformation provided an influential model, the Irish context was substantially different, and the end result totally contrary. In England, state, church, and people became Protestant: in Ireland, church and state adopted the Reformation, but the people remained resolutely Catholic. The failure of the popular dimension of the Reformation created a basic and often bitter divide. Into this framework of religious division, the further variables of political, social, ideological, and economic divisions have to be woven, giving rise to the subtle complexities of Irish early modern and modern history.

Traditionally there was a tendency, not unnatural given the depth of the religious divide in later centuries, to read later confessional attitudes back into the reign of Henry VIII and to write off the prospects of the Reformation almost before it had begun. Catholic historians attributed the country's loyalty to the pope to its ‘fundamentally Catholic disposition’, and repeatedly pointed to the intense popular distaste for and resentment at the imposition of religious changes. Protestant writers, on the other hand, attributed the failure of the Reformation to the ‘backwardness and superstition’ of the Irish people, and even their ‘slipshod … moral conduct’. More recent scholarship has revised this stark picture, reevaluating casual assumptions about the inevitability of the success of Catholicism and the failure of the Reformation, suggesting that confessional divisions arose more slowly in a series of distinct stages.

The early Reformation under Henry VIII (1536–1547)

This was primarily concerned with the issue of jurisdiction. The Act of Supremacy passed by the Irish parliament in 1536 declared Henry VIII to be the supreme head of the Church of Ireland. Modern scholars have concluded that the Dublin government was relatively successful in gaining support for royal supremacy, even from bishops outside the Pale, though allegiances in this period were far from clear‐cut. The most obvious practical use of the supremacy was the dissolution of the monasteries, an event which modern studies have concluded was not the sweeping social, cultural, and religious calamity once assumed.

The Protestant Reformation under Edward VI (1547–1553) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

The reign of Edward VI marked the first efforts to establish a doctrinal Reformation, as Protestant liturgy and bishops were introduced to Ireland. The hostile reaction of previously conformist clergy and laity pointed to the continuing strength of religious conservatism and survivalist Catholicism even within the established church. After the untroubled restoration of Catholicism under Mary (1553–8), the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1560, comprising the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity, again sought to impose Protestantism. The English monarch was declared the supreme governor of the Church of Ireland. All citizens were to attend their parish church on Sunday where they were to worship according to the Book of Common Prayer or face a fine of 12d. The civil and ecclesiastical courts were to ensure that the population obeyed.

In England the enforcement of the Reformation at central and local level slowly created a Protestant nation during the reign of Elizabeth. In Ireland this never happened, for three reasons. First, the weakness of government: the authority of the Dublin administration was limited to only a part of the island and even there it was repeatedly challenged by risings and revolts. As a result it was never possible for the state consistently to enforce religious uniformity. Second, the weakness of the established church: short of committed Protestant clergy, with many of its benefices impoverished by lay encroachment and its churches ruinous, it proved incapable of providing adequate pastoral care. When the church did manage to procure Protestant preachers, they often came from England, which strengthened the image of the Reformation in Ireland as a foreign imposition rather than an indigenous movement. Finally Protestant weakness provided a breathing space in which Catholicism could regroup and ensure that it retained the loyalty of the Irish population. Increasingly during the reign of Elizabeth conservative‐minded native Irish and Anglo‐Irish churchmen and laity turned, not to the established church, but to its Catholic rival. Attachment to the Catholic faith was strengthened by the influx of priests and laymen educated in the Catholic countries of mainland Europe, and by the alienation of both Anglo‐Irish and native Irish from the Dublin government in the later 16th century, as policies of colonization and Anglicization displaced native inhabitants. (See counter‐reformation.)

The consolidation of the official Reformation under James I (1603–1625)

The reign of James I has been termed the ‘Second Reformation’—the period when the Church of Ireland finally established a presence throughout the whole of Ireland. Bolstered by the assertion of royal power after the defeat of Hugh O'Neill, by the plantation of Ulster and the influx of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland after 1607, and by the creation of the Protestant seminary of Trinity College in 1592, the established church began to create a more clearly Protestant ministry. Yet even this Second Reformation was only partial: the new clergy were for the most part unable to speak Irish, and ministered largely to New English and Scottish settlers and officials, while the mass of the native Irish and Anglo‐Irish population remained loyal to a newly reorganized Catholic church.

In a sense the Reformation in Ireland was open ended, and it has even been suggested that it was not till the Catholic devotional revolution of the 19th century that one can truly speak of the failure of the Protestant church in Ireland. But this is to ignore the real signs in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that a decisive change had occurred in Irish religious allegiances. What had appeared fluid, confused, and even open under Henry VIII, by the reign of James I seemed set in distinct confessional camps. The Reformation was identified as English and foreign, while Catholicism began increasingly to be identified with the native culture and people of Ireland. As William Bedell, bishop of Kilmore, concluded in 1634, in assessing the missionary failure of the Protestant church: ‘the popish clergy is double to us in number, and having the advantage of the tongue, of the love of the people, of our extortions on them, of the very inborn hatred of subdued people to their conquerors, they hold them still in blindness and superstition, ourselves being the chiefest impediments to the work that we pretend to set forward’.

Bibliography

Clarke, Aidan , ‘Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland’, in W. J. Shiels and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (1989)
Ford, Alan , The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (1987)
Murray, James , ‘The Church of Ireland: A Critical Bibliography, 1536–1603’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993)

Alan Ford