The Protestant History of the Irish Reformation

Abstract

448 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 The Protestant History of the Irish Reformation Alan Ford By splitting Europe into two rival religious camps, the Reformation gave birth to two distinct and divergent ways of writing its history: one Protestant, the other Catholic. Since each of these rival intellectual traditions claimed to represent truth and orthodoxy, each denouncing the other as false and heretical, this presented historians with an impossible challenge, one which, over the next three centuries, they signally failed to meet. What I want to do in this article is look at one side of these twin historiographical traditions by tracing how Protestant writers responded to the challenge of writing the history of the Reformation in Ireland. I will, for the sake of brevity, confine myself to the history of the Church of Ireland – there is, of course, another article to be written on the other Protestant denominations. I will cover the period, roughly from 1600 to the 1950s, when there was an identifiably Protestant school of history. Two of the most important challenges which faced Protestant historians when tackling the Irish Reformation were, first, that it did not seem very Irish; and second, that it was not much of a Reformation. Let us take these two issues in sequence. In England, it is possible, though still a matter of argument, to point to a tradition of underground dissent – the Lollards for example – and, more uncontroversially, to a tradition of humanist scholarship which in some ways prepared the ground for the Reformation, and helped the rapid growth of an indigenous reform movement from the 1520s onwards, as Luther’s ideas were adopted and adapted by his English followers. Ireland provided much less receptive ground for new ideas: there were no undercurrents of dissent, no unified polity, no common language, no university, no printing press; in short, no shared public sphere and very few Protestants. When, in 1536, the Irish parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, the very wording of the statute – largely following that of the English act and only substituting the word Ireland for England – pointed to its English origins. Given that one of the main attractions of the Reformation across Europe Alan Ford Studies • volume 106 • number 424 449 was its vernacular emphasis – the Bible and liturgy available not in Latin, but in a language the ordinary people could understand – the fact that the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1560) provided for the Book of Common Prayer to be used in Latin in Irish-speaking areas, suggests a certain difficulty in exploiting the vernacular appeal of the Reformation in Ireland. The close chronological association between the imposition of English civil authority in Ireland across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the attempts to spread the Reformation led, unsurprisingly, to many Irish people seeing Protestantism as an alien and foreign imposition. The second challenge for historians of the Reformation in Ireland is that there was no Reformation. This is, of course, exaggerating slightly: the Henrician and Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1536 and 1560) created an established state Church, the Church of Ireland, governed by the monarch, with bishops, clergy and laity. The inescapable fact remains, however, that this Church only ever gained the support of a small percentage of the Anglo-Irish – the descendants of the mediaeval Anglo-Norman settlers – and an even smaller proportion of the native Irish. The majority of the adherents of this minority state Church were English, Welsh and Scottish settlers who came over to Ireland in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is no coincidence that the province which still today has the highest proportion of Church of Ireland members is Ulster, the location of the most successful colonial venture. And, of course, this reliance on settlers and the failure to win native adherents only further accentuated the Englishness of the Church of Ireland. The result was famously summed up by the Protestant historian, Sir Richard Cox, in 1689: ‘at this day we know no difference of nation but what is expressed by Papist and Protestant; if the most ancient natural Irish-man be Protestant, no man takes him to be other than an English-man; and if a Cockney...