August
Amongst the laity the opposition to the Reformed doctrines, instead of diminishing, increased as time went on. At first, when the externals of worship had been but little changed, the common people had not fully understood that a new religion, condemned by the Pope, was being forced on them by the ” Saxon ” Government, but when they came to realise this, resistance became general. The towns, in which the majority of the inhabitants were of English blood, were no more obedient than were the rural districts. Waterford, always renowned for its ” loyalty,” became no less so for its ” Popery.” ” At Waterford the Gospel is abhorred; the Church deserted; sacraments eschewed; Masses in every corner ; beads carried openly; images set up at the house doors and worshipped; friars maintained,” says the (Reformed) Bishop Middleton (1580).
All classes were equally implicated. Judges and jurymen would not take the oaths; in Armagh no one could be found willing to become a Justice of the Peace, for fear that the said oaths would be tendered to him. When, in Dublin, there was a Thanksgiving service for the Armada victory (1588), few people attended. Archbishop Adam Loftus reports (1565) that the chief gentlemen of the Pale go to Mass. Sometimes, indeed, the authorities have more satisfactory news to tell. The Lord Deputy (Fitzwilliam) writes that 2,000 people assisted at a solemn Thanksgiving sermon in Cork (1589). But these instances are rare and cannot outweigh the strong testimony that, in general, no progress whatever was being made in the propagation of the new faith.
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July
The religious houses of Ireland had served many useful purposes in the social life of the people. They had provided hospitals for the sick, orphanages for poor children, refuges for the aged. The monks and nuns kept boarding schools, in which the boys and girls of the upper classes were educated. In a country where inns were few, they offered hospitality to travellers, sometimes even to the Lord Deputy himself. Learned men resorted to them. The establishments in the Pale supplied and paid soldiers for the King’s hostings ; the subsidies collected from them helped the King’s revenue.
These and similar considerations were urged, and urged in vain, even by English officials, to obtain exemption from the common fate for at least a few of the monasteries and convents. The religious, men and women alike, were driven out into a rough world, the ways of which most of them had forgotten or had never known. The lands and houses were assigned or sold to laymen or sometimes to corporations. In either case the new owners usually allowed the buildings to fall into ruin. It often happened that one or more parishes had been under the care of a monastery ; and thus, by its suppression, the spiritual interests of the parishioners suffered, as much as did their corporal ones, by the cessation of the various forms of charity formerly practised by the dispossessed monks and nuns.
The dissolution of the monasteries was accompanied, in some instances, by violence and bloodshed, and many religious suffered imprisonment and even death, rather than profess adherence to the doctrine of the Supremacy. In 1539 a Commission was appointed to search out and destroy relics, and to remove the images and the valuable ornaments, chalices and so forth from the public churches. Those of the monastery chapels were confiscated to the King’s use as each house was dissolved. The golden chalices, crosses and the rest were, some of them, sent to England, some transferred to the mint to be melted down into coins. The relics were usually burnt. Probably nothing served more to inflame the hatred of the Irish people against the Reformed doctrines, and those who strove to propagate them, than the destruction of these objects, which they had always been accustomed to regard with the utmost veneration.
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