Monarchy

On 18 June 1541 the Irish parliament declared Ireland to be a kingdom. It was a decisive change in Ireland's constitutional status that was to endure until the Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. Yet Ireland was no ordinary kingdom. Only in legal theory did its king exist as an individual distinct from the English monarch. The Irish kingdom remained de facto a dependency of the English Crown, but the vision of a sovereign Irish kingdom was to inspire separatist sentiments over many subsequent years.

CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION?

Since Pope Adrian IV granted the bull Laudabiliter to Henry II, king of England, in 1155, Ireland was considered to be a papal fief held by the kings of England. With Henry VIII's breach with the papacy in 1534 the sovereignty of Ireland was disputed. The preamble of the Irish act of 1541 justified the adoption of the royal title as a means of clarifying Ireland's constitutional status, but the act was part of a broader, constitutional strategy to confederate Ireland with England and Wales.

This constitutional "revolution" was the brainchild of Sir Thomas Cusack, a local official in the Dublin administration. Cusack had been influenced by humanist thought during his legal studies at the Inner Temple in London, and he returned to Ireland with a sense of mission. He wanted to see the government of Ireland reformed so that the native Irish and the English colonial community in Ireland could live harmoniously together within a common political framework. Following recent developments in Wales, in particular the so-called Act of Union of 1536, he believed that the two communities in Ireland (Gaelic and "Old English") could be reconciled and reformed through constitutional means. Cusack won support from Sir Anthony Saint Leger, whom Henry VIII appointed as his lord deputy in Ireland in July 1540. Saint Leger was more an administrator than a soldier, and he boldly grasped the opportunity to try to pacify Ireland through constitutional means.

The 1541 "act for the kingly title" was the centerpiece of the Cusack–Saint Leger initiative. Ostensibly, the act was to encourage the Irish to accept Henry VIII as their true sovereign, but Cusack explained to the English Privy Council that it had far deeper implications. It required the abolition of the de facto constitutional and juridical division of Ireland into the English colony on the one hand and the independent Irish lordships on the other. It made all of the people of Ireland into subjects of Henry VIII, with the same rights and privileges as the king's English subjects. Henry became now honor-bound to dispense justice and good government throughout his new kingdom. A public holiday was declared in Ireland to mark the passing of the act, and it was promulgated in Dublin with a high mass, cannonades, bonfires, and free wine.

The Irish parliament that adopted the act for the kingly title was historic for another reason: an Irish layman sat as a member for the first time. He was Barnaby MacGilpatrick, made baron of Upper Ossory only two days before the parliament had convened. Other Irish lords attended as observers, ahead of their elevation to the peerage. The presence of these Irish nobles in this parliament was a revolutionary innovation. It signified that in the future the Irish parliament would become the representative assembly of all the people in Ireland—Gaelic Irish and Old English colonists alike. By involving the two communities in the government in this way, Saint Leger and Cusack hoped to unite the peoples of Ireland as the Welsh and English people in Wales had been brought together.

SURRENDER AND REGRANT

With the constitutional framework in place, Saint Leger introduced the policy known as "surrender and regrant." This involved the Irish lords surrendering their territories to the Crown in return for letters patent by which the king regranted them their lands with a title valid under English law. This formula was designed to regularize the relationship between the Crown and the greatest Irish lords. It also began the process by which the independent Irish lordships were to be transformed, more or less as they stood, into feudal lordships held of the Crown of Ireland. As part of this process each Irish lord had to abandon his Gaelic title and accept instead an English title of nobility, such as earl or baron. He agreed to assist and obey the king's officers, to do military service for the Crown, and to pay taxes. Furthermore, the lord was obliged to learn to speak English, and to adopt English clothes and customs, and to reject the pope's authority.

Saint Leger realized that the assimilation of all of Ireland into the Tudor dominions could not be achieved overnight. He worked to bring about change gradually and relatively peacefully. He appreciated that some compulsion would be necessary on occasion to enforce the desired degree of constitutional change and social engineering. Already, the first breakthrough had come in January 1541 when James FitzGerald, fourteenth earl of Desmond, was formally reconciled to the English Crown. As Cusack observed, "the winning of the earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster at small charge." Progress with the Gaelic Irish lords was necessarily more difficult and slow. Yet, in September 1542 Conn O'Neill, lord of Tyrone and descendent of the ancient kings of Ireland, traveled to the English court to become the first earl of Tyrone. On 1 July 1543, Murrough O'Brien, prince of Thomond, traveled to court to become the first earl of Thomond. With him went Ulick MacWilliam Burke, a magnate from southern Connacht, who became the first earl of Clanrickard.

REFORMATION

In religion too Saint Leger made progress, winning widespread acquiescence for a moderated version of the Henrician reformation, a schismatic, if essentially Catholic religious settlement in which the pope's authority was renounced by Ireland's political and ecclesiastical elites—Irish as well as colonial—while traditional religious practices were permitted. The first Jesuit mission to Ireland, in 1542 was quickly aborted when the missioners concluded that the Irish were irredeemably lost to Rome.

SUSPENSION

The Cusack-Saint Leger initiative was making remarkable progress toward a peaceful settlement of the political divisions in Ireland when it was suddenly suspended. In July 1543 Henry embarked on a war with France and Scotland. Many Irishmen fought with the English army against the French and the Scots; however, the constitutional revolution never recovered from its suspension. The protracted negotiations to reform the internal structures of the Irish lordships were interrupted and left incomplete, a major deficiency which undermined the prospects of future success. Saint Leger might have been able to inject new momentum into the would-be revolution once the war with France and Scotland had ended, but the death of Henry VIII in January 1547 also spelled the end of the Cusack–Saint Leger initiative. The government of Henry VIII's son and successor Edward VI, adopted militarist strategies to subjugate the Irish and rejected Saint Leger's achievement of religious consensus in favor of more full-blooded Protestantism.

CONCLUSIONS

The Irish monarchy established in 1541 failed to reconcile the people of Ireland to English, and later British, governance. In fact, the monarchy was a legal fiction that did little to diminish Ireland's constitutional subordination to the English Crown and government. Irish people were not granted political and legal rights equal to those of English subjects under Henry VIII or his son, and in Elizabeth I's reign conformity to the Anglican Church began to be used as a test of who was a true subject and who was not. Nevertheless, after the repeated failure of rebellions against Elizabeth, the idea of an Irish monarchy came to be accepted, and Irish and Old English scholars supplied the monarchy with an ancient Irish pedigree. The ideal of Ireland as a kingdom separate from England, though sharing the same monarch, was promoted at different times over the centuries by groups as diverse as the Kilkenny Confederates of the 1640s, the late-eighteenth-century Patriots, and even by the nascent Sinn Féin.

SEE ALSO English Government in Medieval Ireland; English Political and Religious Policies, Responses to (1534–1690); Fitzgerald, Thomas, Tenth Earl of Kildare ("Silken Thomas"); Old English; Politics: 1500 to 1690; Protestant Reformation in the Early Sixteenth Century; Surrender and Regrant; Wentworth, Thomas, First Earl of Strafford

Bibliography

Bradshaw, Brendan. The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century. 1979.

Brady, Ciarán. The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588. 1994.

Ellis, Steven G. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule. 1998.

Henry A. Jefferies