The Reformation in Ireland was a movement for the reform of religious life and institutions that was introduced into Ireland by the English administration at the behest of King Henry VIII of England. His desire for an annulment of his marriage was known as the King's Great Matter. Ultimately Pope Clement VII refused the petition; consequently, in order to give legal effect to his wishes, it became necessary for the King to assert his lordship over the Catholic Church in his realm. In passing the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, the English Parliament confirmed the King's supremacy over the Church in the Kingdom of England. This challenge to Papal supremacy resulted in a breach with the Catholic Church. By 1541, the Irish Parliament had agreed to the change in status of the country from that of a Lordship to that of Kingdom of Ireland.
Unlike similar movements for religious reform on the continent of Europe, the various phases of the English Reformation as it developed in Ireland were largely driven by changes in government policy, to which public opinion in England gradually accommodated itself. In Ireland, however, the government's policy was not embraced by public opinion; the majority of the population continued to adhere to Catholicism.
Norman and English monarchs used the title "Lord of Ireland" to refer to their Irish conquests dating from the Norman invasion of Ireland. In passing the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, the Irish Parliament granted Henry, by his command, a new title – King of Ireland. The state was renamed the Kingdom of Ireland. The King desired this innovation because the Lordship of Ireland had been granted by the Papacy; technically, he held the Lordship in fief from the Pope. As Henry had been excommunicated in 1533 and again in 1538, he worried that his title could be withdrawn by his overlord, the Pope.
Henry also arranged for the Irish Parliament to declare him the head of the "Church in Ireland". The main instrument of state power in the establishment of the state church in the new Kingdom of Ireland was the Archbishop of Dublin, George Brown. He was appointed by the King upon the death of the incumbent, though without the approval of the Pope. The Archbishop arrived in Ireland in 1536. The reforms were continued by Henry's successor, Edward VI. The Church of Ireland claims Apostolic succession because of the continuity in the hierarchy; however this claim is disputed by the Catholic Church, which asserts, in Apostolicae curae, that Anglican orders are invalid.
Henry's sanctions on outspoken Catholics and Lutherans differed; Catholics loyal to the Holy See were to be prosecuted as traitors, while Lutherans, much rarer in Ireland, were to be burned at the stake as heretics. He promulgated the Six Articles Act in 1539.
Henry died in 1547. In his reign, prayers remained the same, with the Latin Breviary still used until the Book of Common Prayer (in English) was introduced from 1549. From 1548, for the first time, Irish Communicants were given wine and bread; the former Roman Rite of the Mass allowed a congregation to be given bread only, with wine taken by the priest.
Quin Abbey, a Franciscan friary built in the 15th century and suppressed in 1541
The dissolutions in Ireland followed a very different course from those in England and Wales. There were around 400 religious houses in Ireland in 1530 – many more, relative to population and material wealth than in England and Wales. In marked distinction to the situation in England, in Ireland the houses of friars had flourished in the 15th century, attracting popular support and financial endowments, undertaking many ambitious building schemes, and maintaining a regular conventual and spiritual life. They constituted around half of the total number of religious houses. Irish monasteries, by contrast, had experienced a catastrophic decline in numbers, such that by the 16th century, it appears that only a minority maintained the daily religious observance of the Divine Office. Henry's direct authority, as Lord of Ireland, and from 1541 as King of Ireland, only extended to the area of the Pale immediately around Dublin. From the late 1530s, his administrators temporarily succeeded in persuading some clan chiefs to adopt his policy of surrender and regrant, including the adoption of his state religion.
Nevertheless, Henry was determined to carry through a policy of dissolution in Ireland – and in 1537 introduced legislation into the Irish Parliament to legalise the closure of monasteries. The process faced considerable opposition, and only sixteen houses were suppressed. Henry remained resolute however, and from 1541 as part of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, he continued to press for the area of successful dissolution to be extended. For the most part, this involved making deals with local lords, under which monastic property was granted away in exchange for oaths of allegiance to the new Irish Crown; consequently, Henry acquired little if any of the wealth of the Irish houses. By the time of Henry's death in 1547, around half of the Irish monastic houses had been suppressed, but many houses of friars continued to resist dissolution until well into the reign of Elizabeth I.
Bishoprics
During the English Reformation, the Church of Ireland suffered in its temporal affairs:[1]
...more than half the clerical property in the kingdom being vested in lay hands; but that of Ireland was in a manner annihilated. Bishopricks, colleges, glebes and tithes were divided without mercy amongst the great men of the time, or leased out on small rents for ever to the friends and relations of the incumbents. Many Irish bishopricks never recovered this devastation, as Aghadoe, Kilfenora and others. The Bishoprick of Ferns was left not worth one shilling. Killala, the best in Ireland, was worth only 300l. per annum; Clonfert, 200l.; the Archbishoprick of Cashel, 100l.; Waterford, 100l.; Cork, only 70l.; Ardagh, 1l. 1s. 8d.; and the rest at even a lower rate.
Religious policy of Edward VI
Henry's son Edward VI of England (1547–53) formally established Protestantism as the state religion, which was as much a religious matter as his father's reformation had been political. His reign only lasted for six years and his principal reform, the Act of Uniformity 1549, had much less impact in Ireland than in England. He abolished the crime of heresy in 1547.[2]
During his reign, attempts were made to introduce Protestant liturgy and bishops to Ireland.[3] These attempts were met with hostility from within the Church, even by those who had previously conformed.[3] In 1551, a printing press was established in Dublin which printed a Book of Common Prayer in English.[4]
The counties in Ireland subjected to British plantations (1556 to 1620). Note that this map is a simplified one, as the amount of land colonised did not cover the entire shaded area.
Henry's and Edward's efforts were then reversed by Queen Mary I of England (1553–1558), who had always been Catholic. On her ascent to the throne, Mary reimposed orthodox Roman Catholicism by the First and Second Statute of Repeal of 1553 and 1555. When some Episcopal sees in Ireland became vacant, clerics loyal to Rome were chosen by Mary, with the approval of the Pope. In other cases, bishops in possession of dioceses that had been appointed by her father, without the approval of the Pope, were deposed.
She arranged for the Act of Supremacy (which asserted England's independence from papal authority) to be repealed in 1554, and also revived the Heresy Acts.[5] In turn it was agreed that the former monasteries would stay dissolved, so as to preserve the loyalty of those who had bought monastic lands, by an Act passed in January 1555 and the agreement of Pope Julius III. In Ireland Mary started the first planned wholesale plantations of settlers from England that, ironically, soon came to be associated with Protestantism.
Also in 1555, the Peace of Augsburg established the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, requiring Christians to follow their ruler's version of Christianity, and it must have seemed that the experiment of reformation had ended.
Mary's Protestant half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I, succeeded in having Parliament pass another Act of Supremacy in 1559.[7] The Act of 1534 had declared the English crown to be 'the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England' in place of the Pope. Any act of allegiance to the Papacy was considered treasonous because the Papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers.
Additionally, the Irish Act of Uniformity, passed in 1560, made worship in churches adhering to the Church of Ireland compulsory. Anyone who took office in the Irish church or government was required to take the Oath of Supremacy; penalties for violating it included hanging and quartering. Attendance at Church of Ireland services became obligatory – those who refused to attend, whether Catholics or Protestant nonconformists, could be fined and physically punished as recusants by the civil powers. Initially Elizabeth tolerated non-Anglican observance, but after the promulgation in 1570 of the Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelsis, Catholics were increasingly seen as a threat to the security of the state. Nevertheless, the enforcement of conformity in Ireland was sporadic and limited for much of the sixteenth century.
The issue of religious and political rivalry continued during the two Desmond Rebellions (1569–1583) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603), both of which overlapped with the Anglo-Spanish War, during which some rebellious Irish nobles were helped by the Papacy and by Elizabeth's arch-enemy Philip II of Spain. Due to the unsettled state of the country Protestantism made little progress, unlike in Celtic Scotland and Wales at that time. It came to be associated with military conquest and colonisation and was therefore hated by many. The political-religious overlap was personified by Adam Loftus, who served as Archbishop and as Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
The bulk of Protestants in Ireland during Elizabeth's reign were confined to the ranks of new settlers and government officials, who formed a small minority.[8] Amongst the native Gaelic Irish and Old English, recusancy pre-dominated and was tolerated by Elizabeth for fear of alienating the Old English further.[8] To them, the official state religion had already changed several times since 1533, and might well change again, as Elizabeth's heir until 1587 was the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.
Elizabeth established Trinity College Dublin in 1592, partly in order to train clergy to preach the reformed faith.[8] In 1571, a Gaelic printing typeface was created and brought to Ireland by dignitaries of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, to print documents in the Irish language for the purposes of evangelisation.[4][9] The liturgy that was intended to be printed was to be used for the preaching in Irish in specially appointed churches in the main town of every diocese.[9] The first translation of the New Testament into Irish was done in 1603,[8] and a translation of the Gospels was sponsored by Richard Boyle.
Religious policy of King James I
The reign of James I (1603–25) started tolerantly, and the Treaty of London (1604) was signed with Spain, but the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 caused him and his officials to adopt a harder line against Catholics who remained in the majority, even in the Irish House of Lords. So few had converted to Protestantism that the Catholic Counter-Reformation was introduced in 1612, much later than in the rest of Europe, typically marked by the Council of Trent, convened in 1545.[10] The Flight of the Earls in 1607 led on to the Plantation of Ulster, but many of the new settlers were Presbyterian and not Anglican; reformed, but not entirely acceptable to the Dublin administration. The settlers allowed James to create a slight Protestant majority in the Irish House of Commons in 1613.
The work of translating the Old Testament into Irish for the first time was undertaken by William Bedell (1573–1642), Bishop of Kilmore, who completed his translation within the reign of Charles I, although it was not published until 1680 in a revised version by Narcissus Marsh (1638–1713), Archbishop of Dublin. Bedell had undertaken a translation of the Book of Common Prayer published in 1606.
In 1631, the Primate James Ussher published A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British, arguing that the earlier forms of Irish Christianity were self-governing, and were not subject to control by the Papacy.[11] Ussher is more famous for his hypothesis, on the basis of Biblical date calculations, that the earth must have been created on 22October 4004BC.
Policies of Commonwealth and Restoration regimes
The final stage was marked by the Irish Rebellion of 1641 by those groups of the Irish nobility that continued in their loyalty to the crown, Catholicism, or both. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649–53 briefly introduced Puritanism as the state religion. The Restoration period that followed and the brief reign of the Catholic James II were characterised by unusual state tolerance for religions in their kingdoms. During the Patriot Parliament of 1689, James II – despite remaining Catholic – refused to abolish his position as head of the Church of Ireland, so ensuring that Protestant bishops attended its sessions.
In the Williamite War in Ireland that followed, absolutism was destroyed, but the majority of the population felt more conquered than ever. The Irish parliament introduced a series of "Penal Laws" with the ostensible purpose of displacing Catholicism as the majority religion. However, there was no consistent attempt by the Protestant Ascendancy to actively convert the bulk of the population to Anglicanism, which suggests that their main purposes were economic – to transfer wealth from Catholic hands to Protestant hands, and to persuade Catholic property owners to convert to Protestantism.
An Irish translation of the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1662 was effected by John Richardson (1664–1747), and was published in 1712.
Despite the Reformation's association with military conquest, the country produced outstanding philosophers who were Anglican Irish writers, some of whom were Church of Ireland clergy, such as James Ussher, Archbishop of Dublin later Primate of Ireland; Jonathan Swift, priest; John Toland, essayist, philosopher and free thinker; George Berkeley, bishop. The Presbyterian philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) had a notable impact in Colonial America.
James Ussher was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific Irish scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his identification of the genuine letters of the church father, Ignatius of Antioch, and for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation as "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004"; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
The Kingdom of Ireland was a dependent territory of England and then of Great Britain from 1542 to the end of 1800. It was ruled by the monarchs of England and then of Great Britain, and was administered from Dublin Castle by a viceroy appointed by the English king: the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Aside from brief periods, the state was dominated by the Protestant English minority. The Protestant Church of Ireland was the state church. The Parliament of Ireland was composed of Anglo-Irish nobles. From 1661, the administration controlled an Irish army. Although styled a kingdom, for most of its history it was, de facto, an English dependency. This status was enshrined in Poynings' Law and in the Declaratory Act of 1719.
In English history, the penal laws were a series of laws that sought to enforce the State-decreed religious monopoly of the Church of England and, following the 1688 revolution, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, against the continued existence of illegal and underground communities of Catholics, nonjuring Anglicans, and Protestant nonconformists. The Penal laws also imposed various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon recusants from mandatory attendance at weekly Sunday services of the Established Church. The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th-century due to the successful activism of Daniel O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation. Penal actions are civil in nature and were not English common law.
The Acts of Supremacy are two acts passed by the Parliament of England in the 16th century that established the English monarchs as the head of the Church of England; two similar laws were passed by the Parliament of Ireland establishing the English monarchs as the head of the Church of Ireland. The 1534 Act declared King Henry VIII and his successors as the Supreme Head of the Church, replacing the Pope. This first Act was repealed during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I. The 1558 Act declared Queen Elizabeth I and her successors the Supreme Governor of the Church, a title that the British monarch still holds.
The Oath of Supremacy required any person taking public or church office in the Kingdom of England, or in its subordinate Kingdom of Ireland, to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church. Failure to do so was to be treated as treasonable. The Oath of Supremacy was originally imposed by King Henry VIII of England through the Act of Supremacy 1534, but repealed by his elder daughter, Queen Mary I of England, and reinstated under Henry's other daughter and Mary's half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I of England, under the Act of Supremacy 1558. The Oath was later extended to include Members of Parliament (MPs) and people studying at universities. In 1537, the Irish Supremacy Act was passed by the Parliament of Ireland, establishing Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church of Ireland. As in England, a commensurate Oath of Supremacy was required for admission to offices.
Caesaropapism is the idea of combining the social and political power of secular government with religious power, or of making secular authority superior to the spiritual authority of the Church, especially concerning the connection of the Church with government. Although Justus Henning Böhmer (1674–1749) may have originally coined the term caesaropapism (Cäseropapismus), it was Max Weber (1864–1920) who wrote that "a secular, caesaropapist ruler ... exercises supreme authority in ecclesiastic matters by virtue of his autonomous legitimacy." According to Weber, caesaropapism entails "the complete subordination of priests to secular power."
The Elizabethan Religious Settlement is the name given to the religious and political arrangements made for England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The settlement, implemented from 1559 to 1563, marked the end of the English Reformation. It permanently shaped the Church of England's doctrine and liturgy, laying the foundation for the unique identity of Anglicanism.
The Supreme Governor of the Church of England is the titular head of the Church of England, a position which is vested in the British monarch. Although the monarch's authority over the Church of England is largely ceremonial and is mostly observed in a symbolic capacity, the position is still relevant to the established church. As the supreme governor, the monarch formally appoints high-ranking members of the church on the advice of the prime minister of the United Kingdom, who in turn acts on the advice of the Crown Nominations Commission. Since the Act of Settlement of 1701, all Supreme Governors have been members of the Church of England.
The Act of Supremacy 1558, sometimes referred to as the Act of Supremacy 1559, is an act of the Parliament of England, which replaced the original Act of Supremacy 1534, and passed under the auspices of Elizabeth I. The 1534 act was issued by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, which arrogated ecclesiastical authority to the monarchy, but which had been repealed by Mary I. Along with the Act of Uniformity 1558, the act made up what is generally referred to as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.
In England and Wales, the Tudor period occurred between 1485 and 1603, including the Elizabethan era during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The Tudor period coincides with the dynasty of the House of Tudor in England, which began with the reign of Henry VII. Under the Tudor dynasty, art, architecture, trade, exploration, and commerce flourished. Historian John Guy (1988) argued that "England was economically healthier, more expensive, and more optimistic under the Tudors" than at any time since the Roman occupation.
In Ireland, the penal laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath acknowledged the British monarch as the "supreme governor" of matters both spiritual and temporal, and abjured "all foreign jurisdictions [and] powers"—by implication both the Pope in Rome and the Stuart "Pretender" in the court of the King of France.
The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. Its origins date from the 6th century, when Pope Gregory I through a Roman missionary and Benedictine monk, Augustine, later Augustine of Canterbury, intensified the evangelization of the Kingdom of Kent, linking it to the Holy See in 597 AD.
The Crown of Ireland Act 1542 is an Act that was passed by the Parliament of Ireland on 18 June 1542, which created the title of "King of Ireland" for monarchs of England and their successors; previous monarchs had ruled Ireland as Lords of Ireland. The first monarch to hold the title was King Henry VIII of England.
Protestantism is the largest religious demographic in the United Kingdom.
The English Protestant Reformation was imposed by the English Crown, and submission to its essential points was exacted by the State with post-Reformation oaths. With some solemnity, by oath, test, or formal declaration, English churchmen and others were required to assent to the religious changes, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing for more than 250 years.
The English Reformation took place in 16th-century England when the Church of England broke away first from the authority of the Pope and bishops over the King and then from some doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church. These events were part of the wider European Reformation: various religious and political movements that affected both the practice of Christianity in Western and Central Europe and relations between church and state.
Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom dates back to the martyrdom of Saint Alban in the Roman era. Attacks on the Church from a Protestant angle mostly began with the English and Irish Reformations which were launched by King Henry VIII and the Scottish Reformation which was led by John Knox. Within England, the Act of Supremacy 1534 declared the English crown to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the Pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. Ireland was brought under direct English control starting in 1536 during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The Scottish Reformation in 1560 abolished Catholic ecclesiastical structures and rendered Catholic practice illegal in Scotland. Today, anti-Catholicism remains present in the United Kingdom, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
'George Browne was an English Augustinian who was appointed by Henry VIII of England to the vacant Episcopal see of Dublin. He became the king's main instrument in his desire to establish the state church in the Kingdom of Ireland. An iconoclast, during the Protestant Reformation he is noted for destroying the Bachal Isu, one of the symbols of authority of the Archbishop of Armagh.
Protestantism is a Christian minority on the island of Ireland. In the 2011 census of Northern Ireland, 48% (883,768) described themselves as Protestant, which was a decline of approximately 5% from the 2001 census. In the 2011 census of the Republic of Ireland, 4.27% of the population described themselves as Protestant. In the Republic, Protestantism was the second largest religious grouping until the 2002 census in which they were exceeded by those who chose "No Religion". Some forms of Protestantism existed in Ireland in the early 16th century before the English Reformation, but demographically speaking, these were very insignificant and the real influx of Protestantism began only with the spread of the English Reformation to Ireland. The Church of Ireland was established by King Henry VIII of England, who had himself proclaimed as King of Ireland.
The 1st Parliament of Queen Elizabeth I was ruled over by Queen Elizabeth I of England on 5 December 1558 and assembled on 23 January 1559. This Parliament would restore many of the laws created by Henry VIII and the English Reformation Parliament. Queen Elizabeth's 1st Parliament passed some 24 public statutes and 17 private measures by the time it was dissolved on 8 May 1559.
References
↑ CrokerThomas Crofton Croker, "Researches in the South of Ireland", section 13, p238. Cloyne.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
