Catholic Reform in Ireland in a European Context

Abstract

456 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Catholic Reform in Ireland in a European Context Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin While exceptionalism is rightly considered a particularly hazardous form of historical explanation, the religious evolution of Ireland during the early modern period can be considered anomalous in European terms.1 First, within the wider family of European Catholicism, Ireland was unusual in that the majority of the island’s inhabitants continued to identify themselves as members of the Church of Rome, although for practically the entirety of the period the monarch of Ireland was Protestant. The closest analogy to this situation was probably the Dutch Republic immediately following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the inclusion of the Generality lands boosted the Catholic proportion of the Dutch population to between forty to fifty per cent. Elsewhere on the continent, however, Catholicism was the majority religion only in those areas where state power rested in Catholic hands, and often where that state power was highly aggressively deployed. Ireland represents a sharp contrast, therefore, with large areas of Scandinavia, most notably Norway, where little enthusiasm for an externally-imposed Reformation existed but where Catholicism nevertheless declined steeply in the face of state hostility. Even in polities such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungary and, to a lesser extent France, where the monarchy was restricted in its capacity to deploy outright coercion to promote adherence to Catholicism, the Church of Rome benefited from active support and partisanship rather than, as in the case of Ireland, facing harassment, restriction and hostility. Ireland as a special case This continued disjunction in religion between monarch and subjects also rendered the island unusual within the wider history of the continent’s confessional states. The early modern European state system was founded on a union of throne and altar in which religious dissidence was not only seen as a deadly threat to the stability of the body politic, but ius reformandi came to be seen as one of the most highly prized attributes of state sovereignty Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin Studies • volume 106 • number 424 457 by European monarchs. Pious princes also conceived it as their duty to promote the mission of the (approved) Church in their dominions and could take heart that this activity both rendered the polity more pleasing to the Almighty, and thus less likely to provoke a divine chastisement, while also isolating and weakening a potential fifth column of religious dissidents who might be driven to make common cause with an external foe in the interests of their deviant beliefs. The advantages conferred by control over the state coercive apparatus and patronage were enormous and allowed monarchs to accomplish some extraordinary metamorphoses. In Austria and Bohemia, the Habsburgs transformed Catholicism from the church of a threatened minority to the accepted religion of the vast majority of the population, while the Elizabethan regime successfully transmuted the religious allegiance of the majority of the English population, although in a manner which stored up significant issues for her successors. Ireland was certainly not a unique case of state confessional failure. Philip II’s attempts to reconfigure both the political and religious governance of the Netherlands provoked a revolt which ultimately saw the Habsburgs lose control over the seven northern provinces of what became the Dutch Republic. Strong resonances can be seen between the Dutch and the Irish experiences in that it can be argued that an original a-confessional cause, in the Netherlands the defence of local autonomy,2 in Ireland resentment of the militaristic state-building wars of the later Tudors, eventually polarised into religious conflict. Where Ireland differed from the Netherlands, however, was the sheer longevity, indeed the institutionalised instability, of the confessional conflict. Eighty years of war in the Netherlands eventually gave the Habsburgs free rein in the southern provinces while in the north an unusually tolerant western European society developed. While religious antagonisms remained potent, they did not represent a mortal threat to the continued viability of the Republic. In Ireland, by contrast, confessional hostilities continued to have the potential to threaten the stability of the entire kingdom to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Within the more narrow confines of the Atlantic archipelago...