Aidan Clarke

Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland

The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

Sir Piers Crosby, 1590–1646: Wentworth’s ‘tawney ribbon’

Sir Piers Crosby, knight and baronet, lived for fifty-six years, but it is not perhaps too much to say that only a single day in that life has brought him to historical notice. That day was 28 November 1634. On the previous afternoon, Lord Deputy Wentworth had informed a joint meeting of the two houses of the Irish parliament that his government was not prepared to honour the promise which King Charles I had given to landed proprietors in Ireland six years earlier and would not permit the passage of acts relinquishing historic royal claims to Irish land. When the commons met on 28 November, a majority of the members vented their anger and disappointment by defeating an entirely uncontroversial government bill. Prominent among that majority, their ringleader if Wentworth is to be believed, was a renegade privy councillor, Sir Piers Crosby. That Wentworth’s account of what happened was seriously misleading is well established, and I have examined it elsewhere as an illustration of the proposition that one of Wentworth’s major achievements was to impose his version of the events of his deputyship upon generations of historians, approving and disapproving alike. His influence similarly colours historical impressions of the people with whom he dealt, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest the interpretative difficulties to which that may give rise by reconstructing the shape of the career of one individual who suffered the dual misfortune of crossing Wentworth’s path and being remembered only by what Wentworth wrote of him.

Robert Dudley Edwards (1909–88)

Robert Dudley Edwards died on 5 June 1988 in Dublin, where he had been born seventy-nine years and one day before. In later life, at least, he would have approved of that exact, spare sentence, because in later life he resolved the conflict between his undisciplined temperament and the discipline of his profession by reducing his role as historian to the task of record keeping. I said as much in a review of his Ireland under the Tudors in 1978, and some weeks later was alarmed to see him making purposefully towards me through a reception crowd, telltale large Paddy held protectively on high. ‘I liked your review’, he shouted across the heads; ‘you were exactly right’. Reaching me, he added in an undertone, ‘they were hoping that I was going to make a scene’. They were, of course, and it was typical of Dudley that he extracted as much satisfaction from disappointing the expectation as he might have done from fulfilling it. Others have told me that he became cantankerous with age, and the evidence is conclusive, but I never experienced anything but generosity from him from beginning to end.

XVIII The History Of Poynings’ Law, 1615–41

Thirty years ago, in a magisterial study of the early operation of Poynings’ Law, Professor R. Dudley Edwards and Professor T.W. Moody noted that ‘the primary dividing-line in the history of the law falls between the parliaments of 1613–15 and 1634–5’. Previously, they showed, it had curtailed the Irish executive and enjoyed the approval of the Irish parliament; only subsequently, they argued, was it used as a means of enabling the government to control parliament. The purpose of the present study is to develop that argument by examining both the way in which Lord Deputy Wentworth took advantage of altered circumstances to reierse the statute’s function in 1634–5 and the way in which members of the Irish parliament unsuccessfully campaigned to restore the traditional interpretation of its provisions in 1640–41.