The Protestant Reformation was an event that had a more far-reaching impact on the history of the British Isles than that of any since the Norman Conquest, and it greatly complicated Ireland’s relations with England. The Reformation came to Britain, not because of a groundswell of popular Protestantism but because Henry VIll wanted a divorce. Soon after his coronation in 1509, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, an attractive and intelligent woman six years his senior and the widow of his elder brother Arthur. By 1526 Henry was a seriously worried man: Catherine would soon be past her childbearing years and she had failed to provide him with a male heir. Henry claimed, and perhaps even believed, that this was a sign that God was displeased with him for marrying his sister-in-law and so he asked Pope Clement VII to grant a divorce. Divorces on the grounds of what was essentially dynastic expediency were not unusual in the Middle Ages, but it was Henry’s bad luck that Clement depended for protection on Catherine’s nephew, the emperor Charles V, and dared not oblige. Henry had always been a conventionally pious Catholic, but his need for a divorce drove him into the arms of Protestant reformers and a breach with the Roman church in 1533.
In 1534 the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy making Henry head of the church in England. Two years later the Irish parliament was easily bullied into passing its own Act of Supremacy, making Henry head of the church in Ireland. Henry was not a natural Protestant and he permitted few doctrinal changes: the most obvious sign of the Reformation was the dissolution of the monasteries in areas under the effective control of the English government (dissolution of the monasteries in autonomous Gaelic areas was not completely accomplished until the early seventeenth century). Irish monasticism was far gone in decline - Ireland’s monasteries were no longer centres of learning and they provided little in the way of care for the poor or sick - but the dissolutions still helped provoke a Gaelic rebellion, known as the War of the Geraldine League, which was crushed at the battle of Bellahoe in 1539. A more thoroughgoing Protestantism was introduced - this time without consulting the Irish Parliament - during the reign of Henry’s son and successor Edward VI (1547-53), but following his early death Catholicism was restored by his elder sister Mary (1553-8), Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s last surviving child, Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), reintroduced Protestantism, but, despite the introduction of stiff penalties to try to enforce church attendance, by the time of her death the new faith had failed to put down firm roots among either the Gaelic Irish or the Old English (as the established Anglo-Irish were called by this time).
The reasons for the failure of the Protestant Reformation are complex and are only partly to do with a sincere devotion to Catholicism among the Irish people: after all, most of the English were equally attached to their traditional beliefs. The crucial difference was that the English government did not control all of Ireland and so was in no position to enforce Protestant worship, as it was in England. Nor could it prevent priests from being trained in Catholic Europe and returning to Ireland. Even in areas it did control, the government was short of Protestant clergy and there were none who could speak Gaelic, nor were religious texts translated into Gaelic. Worse, most of the Protestant clergy came from England, creating an impression that the Reformation was just another unasked-for English imposition on Ireland, as indeed it was.
World History
