The New Church Policy

During the closing years of Henry’s reign, Ireland was fairly tranquil and even prosperous. In January 1547, Henry VIII died. Though the officials who exercised power in his name in Ireland had been guilty of not a few acts of cruelty and treachery, yet their rule, as compared to that of their successors under the later Tudors, might be described as mild ; while the King himself, in dealing with the native rulers, showed, on several occasions, a moderation scarcely to be expected in the man under whose tyrannical sway such brutal deeds had been done in England.

In Ireland, though the extent of territory under the direct authority of the English Government had not been much extended, yet certainly the power of the Crown, and the respect for it felt by both the Anglo-Irish nobles and the Celtic chiefs, had greatly increased. To the former the destruction of the House of Kildare had been a terrible lesson; while the latter had seen those who stood highest amongst them make ” submissions ” to the King and solicit titles at his hands.

We have seen {Book I) that, according to the old Irish system the land of a clan was considered as fundamentally belonging, in its several portions, to the family groups, which, taken together, constituted the State. The chief’s mensal land was ultimately the property of the State as a whole. It was an appanage of the chieftaincy, and, on the death of an occupant, passed to the elected successor. However much the custom of limiting the succession in practice to the members of one family had obscured this notion, it was still present to the minds of the people, and a verbal or practical denial of it would be resented.

In the agreements made between the chiefs and Henry VIII the communal ownership of the lands was not indeed denied, nothing was said regarding it. All that was specifically done, with regard to possessions other than the mensal lands, was to give the chief a right under English law to the powers over them which previously he had exercised without it. Of his mensal lands he was now constituted absolute owner, and they were to be transmitted by primogeniture to his heirs. A few clans had been in the habit of practising primogeniture, but the great majority had not, preferring usually a brother or a nephew, the son of an elder brother, to the son of a deceased chief. In these clans the introduction of the new succession law became a fertile source of dispute. Again, from regarding himself as absolute owner of the mensal land to regarding himself as absolute owner of the rest of the clan territory, and the clansmen as merely his tenants, was, for an ambitious chief, an easy step, and one which English officials often, when it suited them, encouraged him to take. The chiefs who had bound themselves by these agreements would now, if they failed to carry out the conditions contained in them, and especially if they rebelled against the English Crown, be liable certainly to forfeit their mensal lands ; it might be convenient to pretend to consider that the whole of the clan land was also theirs, and so forfeit also.

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.