On breaking with Rome, Henry VIII sought to extend his political and ecclesiastical ‘Empire’, and to regularise religion, language, law and culture within it. If this proved relatively easy in Wales, it turned out to be harder and less successful in Ireland. The reasons for this failure were historical and geo-political.
In 1169, the Anglo-Irish invasion had created an English colony called The Pale, extending forty miles inland from the coast between Dublin and Dundalk. Since 1175, English monarchs had been designated ‘Lord of Ireland’ and had been supported by an ‘Irish Parliament’, but in fact their power was confined to The Pale and a few other English-speaking royalist strongholds. Beyond the Pale lay two effectively independent states—one Anglo-Irish and the other Gaelic. Bishoprics in the Pale tended to be occupied by Englishmen, but came more directly under the auspices of Rome than their counterparts across the Irish Sea. Beyond the Pale, bishops were largely native Irishmen, many of whom spoke English only as a second language, and who bore loyalty to the pope rather than the Sovereign.
The 1534 Act of Supremacy had already designated Henry Supreme Head of the church in all Ireland when, in 1541, he was also declared ‘King of Ireland’. Criticism of Henry’s rule or ecclesiology was deemed treason; appeals to Rome were outlawed; the Irish language was proscribed, and some 130 monasteries both within and beyond the Pale were suppressed. Henry’s Irish reforms were spearheaded by a special commission led by the Archbishop of Dublin, George Brown (d. 1556). A newly-formed Church of Ireland sanctioned the destruction of many images and shrines, and resentment at this was not helped by Browne and others’ insistence on using English in Irish-speaking congregations—a policy which stunted evangelism and teaching of the Protestant faith. Furthermore, though Henry had refused papal authority, the pope continued to appoint Irish bishops regardless, thus creating confusion and uncertainty among the people.
Under Edward and Elizabeth, the Prayer Book was enforced, but many who publicly endorsed it still privately maintained their Catholic faith. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1601 the Battle of Kinsale effectively sealed the Tudor conquest of Ireland, but by now the English church was so disconnected from the people that the spiritual battle had mostly been lost. Further power was gained through the extension of English and Scottish plantations into confiscated Irish land, but this also destroyed the trust needed to foster a missionary church.
Later conflicts stoked the tensions, from James I’s insistence that all Catholic priests should leave and all Irish people should join the Church of Ireland in 1605, through Cromwell’s bloody massacre at Drogheda, to William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
The large majority of the Irish population continued to resent English rule and Anglican polity, and by 1833 the London Whig government moved to abolish ten Irish bishoprics—a decision which triggered the birth of the Oxford Movement. In 1869, the Church of Ireland was disestablished, although it had always struggled to make establishment work. The legacy of this imperial, political and religious struggle is seen to some extent in the modern partition of Ireland into the British-linked majority Protestant northern Province of Ulster, and the largely Catholic southern republic of Eire. This partition dates from 1921. From the beginning of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969 until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly shortly afterwards, it bore out a long, sad history of religious, ethnic and socio-political strife. The hope is that this sorrowful chapter in the history of church-state relations may now be giving way to a happier narrative.
