Attitudes of the Leaders Towards an Epoch of Reformation
Browne made an attempt to evangelise the more distant parts of his archdiocese, and even places outside it. He accompanied some of the Council on a sort of legal circuit through part of Leinster and Munster. The Archbishop, we are told (1539), preached to crowded congregations at the various towns, ” setting forth the word of God and the King’s Supremacy.”
On the following days the Sessions were held, and criminals judged and ” put to execution.” This progress, ” which equally resembled a gaol delivery and an episcopal visitation, tvherein the Archbishop and hangman played their parts alternately,” can scarcely have produced many sincere conversions.
The Council certainly boasted that eight bishops and two archbishops came before them in Clonmel and took the required oaths, but it is suspicious that neither the names nor the Sees of these bishops are mentioned. They may well have been mere creations of the King. Of bishops of Papal creation who certainly ” conformed ” we know of only five. When the news of their action reached Rome they were ” deposed for heresy,” and their Sees, and those which became vacant by death, were filled up by the Pope in the usual manner. Of the inferior clergy, few within the Pale, and scarcely any outside it, took the Supremacy Oath.
Some heads of religious houses ” went over ” and were rewarded by gifts of lands or by episcopal appointments. In the submissions of the Irish chiefs, of which we find many in the English State papers, dating from 1537 onwards, there is generally, but not always, a clause by which the chief promises to renounce the’authority of ” the Bishop of Rome,” or ” the Sovereign Pontiff.” This, of course, implies an acknowledgment of the King as Head of the Church. Some even go further, and specifically declare their adherence to the Royal Supremacy.
The full significance of Henry’s claim, and the consequence likely to follow it, probably none of them understood. It must also be confessed that in Ireland, at that period, it was much the habit to enter into engagements without any intention of carrying them out. Laws were constantly passed which no one even attempted to bring into effect, and which, indeed, in many cases, could not have been brought into effect by anyone.
The very English Government itself, as administered in Ireland, rested on two contradictory assumptions—that the King of England was ” Lord of Ireland,” and that the native Irish were his ” enemies.”