
http://www.cambridge.org/9780521643184


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The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland

Thomas Wentworth landed in Ireland in 1633 – almost 100 years after Henry VIII
had begun his break with Rome. The majority of the people were still Catholic.
William Laud had just been elevated to Canterbury. A Yorkshire cleric, John
Bramhall, followed the new viceroy and became, in less than one year, Bishop
of Derry. This study, which is centred on Bramhall, examines how these three men
embarked on a policy for the established church which not only represented a break
with a century of reforming tradition but which also sought to make the tiny Irish
church a model for the other Stuart kingdoms. Dr McCafferty shows how accom-
panying canonical changes were explicitly implemented for notice and eventual
adoption in England and Scotland. However, within eight years the experiment
was blown apart and reconstruction denounced as subversive. Wentworth, Laud
and Bramhall faced consequent disgrace, trial, death or exile.

JOHN M C CAFFERT Y is Director of the Mı́cheál Ó Cléirigh Institute at
University College Dublin. He has recently edited, with Alan Ford, The Origins of
Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (2005).


Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

Series editors

anthony fletcher
Emeritus Professor of English Social History, University of London

john guy
Fellow, Clare College, Cambridge

john morrill
Professor of British and Irish History, University of Cambridge,

and Vice-Master of Selwyn College

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of
the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth

century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a
new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics

and books, which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new
perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research into our

broader perspectives and the books are intended for the use of students as well as
of their teachers.

For a list of titles in the series, see end of book.


THE RECONSTRUCTION
OF THE CHURCH OF

IRELAND
Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian

Reforms, 1633–1641

JOHN M CCAFFER TY
University College Dublin


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

First published in print format

ISBN-13    978-0-521-64318-4

ISBN-13 978-0-511-34925-6

© John McCafferty 2007

2007

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521643184

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of 
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place 
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

ISBN-10    0-511-34925-4

ISBN-10    0-521-64318-X

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls 
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not 
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

hardback

eBook (EBL)

eBook (EBL)

hardback

http://www.cambridge.org
http://www.cambridge.org/9780521643184


In memoriam Pádraic McCafferty, 10 September 2006


CONTENTS

List of tables page viii
Acknowledgements ix
Note on the text xi
List of abbreviations xii
Map: Church of Ireland dioceses, c.1636 xiv

1 Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 1

2 Raising up the Church of Ireland: John Bramhall and the
beginnings of reconstruction, 1633–1635 21

3 English codes and confession for Ireland, 1633–1636 59

4 The bishops in the ascendant, 1635–1640 114

5 Enforcing the new order, 1635–1640 154

6 The downfall of reconstruction, 1640–1641 193

7 Conclusion: reconstruction as reformation 223

Bibliography 230
Index 261

vii


TABLES

3.1 Canon 1, 1634: a comparative table page 78
3.2 English canons deliberated, 1634 94
3.3 Comparison of 1603 and 1634 canons 95
3.4 English canons omitted in their entirety from the Irish code 96
3.5 Irish canons with no 1603 counterparts 105
4.1 Armagh province reported improvements 1636 and 1639 147
4.2 Episcopal revenues, 1629 and c.1640 (1655) 149
5.1 The 1636 commissioners 164

viii


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When a book has been as long in the making as this one there are many
people to thank. Very many things have come between this work and its
completion over the years. Some of those things were wonderful and some
banal but now it is finished. It has its flaws but it is less flawed than it would
have been had not several friends read drafts. There is a custom which calls
upon authors to thank the readers by name. I am not going to follow it
because I do not wish to implicate my friends in any mistakes or enlist
them in my stubbornness. You know who you are. Thank you so much.

I started researching John Bramhall in St John’s College, Cambridge. Its
fellows awarded me a Benefactors’ scholarship, they even paid for micro-
filming through the Harry Hinsley memorial fund, and then they elected
me to a title ‘A’ fellowship. All of which leaves me indebted to that society
for some of the happiest years I have spent. John Morrill took care of me
in Cambridge and never stopped believing in this project. He has been,
and is, a wonderful and generous adviser and friend. He is a great advo-
cate for Irish history in Britain and he delighted many people when he
incorporated it into the title of his chair. I have been both medievalist and
early modernist but the fact I have spent so much time on Stuart history is
due to Brian Sommers, and to his brilliant seminars and endless support.
James McGuire is the best of friends and he has shown how to keep to true
scholarly values in all the storms and stresses of university affairs. Ciaran
Brady is one of the best people I know to talk about history. Our meetings
are always happy. Art Cosgrove was my first postgraduate supervisor and
I am still grateful to him. Any ability I have to read historical documents
thoroughly is due to the excellent training I received from Charlie Doherty.

There are others to thank. Gerald Bray for his remarkable generosity,
Brendan Bradshaw for his insight and encouragement and Seán Hughes
for patient theological advice and friendship over many years. A lot of
other people helped in various ways and I thank them for it, especially
Brian Jackson, Kate Breslin, Ivar McGrath, Eamon Ó Ciardha, Peter Gray,

ix


x Acknowledgements

Mı́cheál Mac Craith, Marc Caball, Brian Mac Cuarta, Mark Empey, Robert
Armstrong, Patrick Little, Patrick Geoghegan, Alan Ford, Oliver Rafferty,
Eamon Duffy, Fergus D’Arcy, Harry White, Rena Lohan, Elva Johnston,
Andrew Carpenter, Alun Carr, Jane Ohlmeyer, Peter Marshall, James
Murray, Arnold Hunt, Julia Merritt, David Smith, Richard Nolan,
Howard Hughes, Peter Linehan, Nial Osborough, Maurice Bric, Bernadette
Cunningham, Dave Edwards, Jebu Rajan, Liam Smith, Aishling Begley
and Michael Clarke. Vincent Morley gave me some excellent advice which
helped me overcome a block and move to finishing the book. Richard
Aldous, Ronan Fanning and Michael Laffan have done me many favours
at UCD, with some convivial times along the way. Pádraic Conway has
been a good friend and helped me sharpen my understanding of ecclesi-
astical politics greatly. Mary Daly showed me great kindness and patience
and forgave many disappearances from other duties. Máire Nı́ Mhaonaigh
and Torsten Meissner gave me a home from home in Cambridge. Patrick
Collinson and Anthony Milton helped this work develop from its earlier
incarnation as did the late Conrad Russell. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam
uasal.

I would also like to record my thanks to the British Academy for funding
me as a PhD student. Librarians and archivists in many places have made
much of what follows possible. If it had not been for a generous donor there
would be no Mı́cheál Ó Cléirigh Institute, of which I have the great honour
of being director. I want to thank very warmly all those who work with
me in this happy project, especially Edel Bhreatnach, Colmán Ó Clabaigh,
Emmett O’Byrne and Malgorzata Krasnodebska-D’Aughton, as well as our
friends and partners, the Irish Franciscans.

Bill Davies has been a great friend to Irish historians and to me.
Michael Watson has been more than patient and understanding. Isabelle
Dambricourt has been unfailingly helpful and kind throughout all stages
of this and another project.

Work on this ‘dead bishop’, as she once called him, commenced before I
married Pádraicı́n and went on and on after the births of Máire, Aoife and
Séamus. My debt to her and to them is just incalculable. My parents, Jim
and Ann, and my sisters, Rachel and Audrey, never thought they would see
the end but out of the goodness of their hearts they kept faith. I am more
grateful to them than I can say. Máire and Aoife, with Séamus consenting,
wanted this book to be called Century after century of Irish history. I am sorry
it has not been possible (as it would violate description of goods legislation)
but it is a worthy title to be saved for another time. The best is kept till
last. So I dedicate this book to Pádraicı́n with great love.


NOTE ON THE TEXT

In the text, dates are Old Style but the year is taken to begin on 1 January.
Of the printed works cited below, the place of publication is London unless
otherwise stated. Spellings have been silently modernised. Unless otherwise
stated, all references to statutes are to those passed by the Irish parliament.

xi


ABBREVIATIONS

Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford
BL British Library
BW A. W. Haddan (ed.), The works of . . .

Bramhall, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1842–5)
Cal. SP Ire. Calendar of state papers relating to Ireland
Clarke, Old English Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland

(1966)
Commons’ jn. Ire. Journals of the House of Commons of the

kingdom of Ireland, vol. I, 1613–66 (Dublin,
1796)

Cotton, Fasti Henry Cotton, Fasti ecclesiae Hibernicae,
6 vols. (Dublin, 1848–78)

DOC Duchy of Cornwall Office, Buckingham
Gate, London

EC English canons of 1603
Ford, Protestant Alan Ford, The Protestant reformation in

Ireland, 1590–1641 (Frankfurt, 1985)
HA Hastings manuscripts, Huntington Library,

California
HJ Historical Journal
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
IC Irish canons of 1634
IHS Irish Historical Studies
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Kearney, Strafford Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland

(Cambridge, repr. 1989)
Knowler W. Knowler (ed.), The earl of Strafford’s letters

and despatches, 2 vols. (1799)
Lib. mun Hib. Rowney Lascelles (ed.), Liber munerum

publicorum Hiberniae, 2 vols. (1824–30)

xii


List of abbreviations xiii

Lismore papers A. B. Grosart (ed.), Lismore papers, 1st series
5 vols., 2nd series 5 vols. (1886–8)

Lords’ jn. Ire. Journals of the House of Lords of the kingdom of
Ireland, vol. I, 1634–99 (Dublin, 1779)

NAI National Archives of Ireland
NHI III T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne

(eds.), A new history of Ireland, vol. III,
1534–1691 (Oxford, repr. 1991)

NLI National Library of Ireland
ODNB Oxford dictionary of national biography

(Oxford, 2004)
P&P Past and Present
PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
Rawdon E. Berwick, The Rawdon papers (1819)
RCB Representative Church Body, Dublin
RIA Royal Irish Academy
Rushworth J. Rushworth (ed.), The trial of Thomas, Earl

of Strafford (1680)
Shirley E. P. Shirley (ed.), Papers relating to the

Church of Ireland, 1631–9 (1874)
Shuckburgh, Two lives E. S. Shuckburgh (ed.), Two lives of William

Bedell (Cambridge, 1902)
SO Signet Office
SP State Papers, Public Record Office, London
STC W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and K. F.

Panzer (eds.), A short-title catalogue of books
printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and
of English books printed abroad, 1475–1640,
3 vols. (1976–86)

Str P Strafford Papers, Sheffield City Libraries
Tanner letters C. McNeill (ed.), The Tanner letters (Dublin,

1943)
TCD Trinity College Dublin
UWW C. E. Elrington (ed.), The whole works of . . .

James Ussher, 17 vols. (Dublin, 1847–64)
Vesey, Athanasius John Vesey, Athanasius Hibernicus (1676)

Hibernicus
WL W. Scott and J. Bliss (eds.), The works of . . .

William Laud, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1847–60)


Derry
Raphoe

Clogher

Connor

Down

Meath

Kildare

Ferns

Waterford

Lismore

CASHEL
EmlyLimerick

Cloyne

Cork

Ross

Ardfert

(Cashel)

Dromore

ARMAGH

Kilmore

Ardagh
Elphin

TUAM

Clonfert

Achonry

Killaloe

Killala

Kilmacduagh

Kilfenora

Diocesan boundaries

Diocesan names

Provincial boundaries

Provincial names

Derry

ARMAGH

DUBLIN

Leighlin
Ossory

Church of Ireland dioceses, c.1636


c h a p t e r 1

Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation

In 1632 James Spottiswoode was rowed out into the middle of Lough Derg in
Co. Donegal. He was a Scot, ordained in the Church of England, who had
become Church of Ireland bishop of Clogher in 1621. He bore a mandate
issued by the lords justices and privy council of Ireland which permitted
him to break down, deface and utterly demolish ‘the chapel and all the
Irish houses now situate in that island called St Patrick’s purgatory, all the
buildings, pavements, walls, works, foundations, circles, caves, cells and
vaults . . . called St Patrick’s bed’. Spottiswoode had a miserable time. The
secular arm, in the form of the high sheriff of Donegal, failed to turn up
and a pilot could not be found. When one was eventually located, the
bishop and his companions were nearly sunk and then narrowly avoided
being marooned by a storm. Meanwhile onlookers, the ‘country people’,
stood by and waited for a divine thunderbolt while Spottiswoode dashed
about toppling hostels, chapels and other devotional structures erected by
the Franciscans only a few years earlier. All of this took place just four years
short of the first centenary of the passing of the Act of Supremacy by the
Irish parliament. By that date, 1636, Lough Derg was once again open for
business as Catholic Ireland’s leading pilgrimage site.1

James Spottiswoode wasted his time and risked the lives of his ser-
vants. That this was so may have caused this younger brother of the arch-
bishop of St Andrew’s to ask himself, in private, a hard question: ‘why did
Ireland not become Protestant?’ Historians of Ireland have, in one way
or another, examined religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and come to the conclusion that reformation failed. Some scrab-
ble for slender examples of success or ambiguity. Others assert failure, but
emphasise conditionality and imply that different administrators and a dif-
ferent administration could have led to a national establishment founded

1 Henry Jones, St Patrick’s Purgatory: containing the description, original, progress and demolition of that
superstitious place (1647), p. 130.

1


2 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

on the 1536 statute.2 Historians of England, by and large, have detected an
overall success marred by instances of failure – delay, contingency, evasion,
church papistry.3 There is more here, though, then a ready contrast. There
is an unexceptionable truth – Ireland got an English reformation. The pace
might have been slightly different and the detail slightly varied, but consti-
tutionally and canonically, the kingdom of Ireland got what the kingdom
of England got. Ireland did not become Protestant because it underwent
an English reformation. Or rather the Irish state-sponsored reformation
faltered and failed for the very reasons that the English state-sponsored
reformation, for all of its acknowledged slowness and mixed messages,
succeeded.

From the very outset, writers in Ireland and writers on Ireland have
used the vocabularies of success and failure.4 Catholics came to argue that
there was something definitive, something innate about the attachment
of the people of Ireland to the faith. Their story was one of muscular
resistance to any ploy to lure them away from the Apostolic See. Their

2 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Edwardian reformation in Ireland’, Archivium Hibernicum 24 (1976–7), 83–
99; ‘Sword, word and strategy in the reformation of Ireland’, HJ 21 (1978), 475–502; ‘The English
reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts
(eds.), British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 43–
111; Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The failure of the Irish reformation: une question bien posée’, JEH 36 (1985),
196–206; Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation failed in Ireland: une question mal posée’, JEH 30
(1979), 423–50; ‘Protestants, planters and apartheid in early modern Ireland’, IHS 25 (1986); Aidan
Clarke, ‘Varieties of uniformity – the first century of the Church of Ireland’ in W. J. Sheils and
Diana Wood (eds.), The churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History 25 (Oxford, 1989),
pp. 105–22; Steven Ellis, ‘Economic problems of the church: why the Reformation failed in Ireland’,
JEH 41 (1990), 239–65; Ford, Protestant, pp. 105–15; G. A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘The royal supremacy and
ecclesiastical revolution, 1534–47’, NHI III, pp. 39–67, ‘Conciliation, coercion, and the Protestant
Reformation, 1547–71’, NHI III, pp. 69–92; ‘The completion of the Tudor conquest and the advance
of the Counter-reformation’, NHI III, pp. 94–140; Henry A. Jefferies, Priests and prelates of Armagh in
the age of reformations, 1518–1558 (Dublin, 1997); Colm Lennon, ‘The counter-reformation in Ireland,
1542–1641’ in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Natives and newcomers (Dublin, 1986),
pp. 75–92.

3 For an accessible recent survey of the historiography, see Peter Marshall, Reformation England (2003).
Given the great size of the field, this footnote lists only a selection of monographs: A. G. Dickens,
The English reformation, 2nd edn (1989); Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars (1992); Christopher
Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993); Norman
Jones, The English reformation: religion and cultural adaptation (Oxford, 2002); Diarmaid MacCul-
louch, Tudor church militant: Edward VI and the English reformation (1999); Peter Marshall (ed.),
The impact of the English reformation 1500–1640 (1997); Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English ref-
ormation (Basingstoke, 1993); J. J. Scarisbrick, The reformation and the English people (Oxford, 1984);
Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in reformation England (Oxford, 2000); Alexandra Walsham,
Church papists: Catholicism, conformity and confessional polemic in early modern England (Woodbridge,
1993).

4 Alan Ford, ‘“Standing one’s ground”: religion, polemic and Irish history since the Reformation’ in
Alan Ford, J. I. McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds.), As by law established: the Church of Ireland since
the reformation (Dublin, 1995), pp. 1–14.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 3

triumph was predicated on Protestant defeat. Protestant commentators,
depending on their mood and inclination, saw anything from gullibil-
ity and pliability to malice and willful obduracy. Popery was superstition
and Rome-running the proof of enduring incivility. This sectional analysis
of affairs, which occasionally tumbled out in pulpit vitriol, jogged along
for centuries. But from the 1960s onwards Irish historians increasingly
replaced character with chronology and determinism with contingency.
Religious change in early modern Ireland reverted to being the hard prob-
lem it had been for contemporaries. The confessional past regained its
open future so that incidents such as that of Lent 1542, when Paschase
Broet and Alphonse Salmeron became the first two Jesuits to set foot in
Ireland, ceased being an early point in a long narrative thread which wound
on until Catholic Emancipation in 1829 or Disestablishment in 1869.5 The
two harbingers of Catholic reformation abandoned their mission after five
weeks. In the wake of a cool reception from Conn O’Neill and Manus
O’Donnell, they concluded Ireland would follow its sovereign Henry VIII
into schism.6 Historians, like the legates, became concerned with trajec-
tory. They retained the trope of success and failure while trying to discern
whether the outcomes were due to economics or the interplay of colonisa-
tion with confessionalisation or even to theological styles. The hard prob-
lem has been rendered even harder by the destruction of swathes of records,
which made it difficult to employ research strategies that have served other
parts of Europe well in any meaningful way beyond broad generalisa-
tion. To take one small example, only very few cities, such as Dublin and
Limerick, offer anything close to real narrative depth over any appreciable
time span.7

Bishop Spottiswoode found his lakeside wait for the high sheriff of
Donegal an unpleasant business. Had he been asked, he would have said
there was only one bishop in Clogher and that was him. If he had been
asked the difference between himself and the popish or ‘pretended’ or ‘titu-
lar’ bishop of Clogher, his answer would have almost certainly contained the
phrase ‘church as by law established’. As it happened, ‘Church of Ireland’

5 Edmund Hogan (ed.), Ibernia Ignatiana (Dublin, 1880), p. 6.
6 Salmeron and Broet to Cardinal Cervini (Santa Crucis), Edinburgh, 9 April 1542, Epistolae

PP. Paschasii Broëti, Claudi Jaji, Joannis Codurii et Simonis Rodericii Societatis Jesu ex autographis
vel originalibus exemplis potissimum depromptae, Monumenta Historica Societas Iesu 24 (Madrid, 1903),
pp. 23–31. I wish to thank Brian Jackson for drawing this reference to my attention.

7 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The reformation in the cities: Cork, Limerick and Galway, 1534–1603’ in John
Bradley (ed.), Settlement and society in medieval Ireland (Kilkenny, 1988), pp. 445–76; Colm Lennon,
The lords of Dublin in the age of reformation (Dublin, 1989); The urban patriciates of early modern
Ireland: a case-study of Limerick, the 28th O’Donnell Lecture (Dublin, 1999).


4 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

came far less readily to contemporary pens and lips than some variant of
‘as by law established’. When, in 1603, Lord Deputy Mountjoy arrived out-
side Waterford city, he found himself looking at a improvised processional
crucifix borne by a vested Dr James White, vicar apostolic of Waterford
and Lismore. The viceroy promptly opened up dialogue by asking, ‘what
are you?’8

The Church of Ireland was the statutory expression of extension and
ratification of English legislation in Ireland. A first glance at statutes for
both kingdoms shows apparently identical lists with small intervals – Acts
of Supremacy in 1534 and 1536, Acts of Uniformity in 1559 and then 1560.
Ireland, and so it seemed to both lay and clerical contemporaries, was
England with a little time lag. The more the smaller island proved to be
different or difficult, the more it seemed the best solution was to make it
England.

Ireland was seductively similar or deceptively different. Which of these
it was depended on your point of view. The Irish ‘reformation’ parliament
of 1536–7 put through Acts of Supremacy, Appeals, Slander, First Fruits,
Against the authority of the bishop of Rome – all mirroring Westminster.9

Apart from cosmetic changes such as replacing ‘England’ with ‘Ireland’ in
the wording of bills and adjusting official titles, they were virtually identi-
cal.10 The preamble to the Irish bill for supreme headship even remarked
on the necessity of following developments across the water by virtue of
the dependency of the Irish crown.11 In the same session a snappy little
bill (at least by Tudor standards) was passed and received royal assent as an
Act for the English Order, Habit and Language. This kind of legislation
was not at all unusual as insistence on the speaking of English, as well as
English hairstyle and dress, had been parliamentary business in 1297, 1366
and afterwards.12 If the other acts can be understood as the start of a process

8 Anon. (ed.), ‘After the death of Queen Elizabeth’, Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine (Nov. 1848), p. 275:
‘Having presented ourselves before his excellency and paid to him all the customary honours in due
form he instantly asked me, “what are you?”. I answered that I was a Christian, a firm Catholic, a
servant and most loyal subject of His Majesty King James. He interrogated me closely, not only on
the meaning but on the etymology of that answer, but after having explained myself to the best of
my power, I perceived that his passion was rising and he called me “traitor”.’

9 28 Hen. VIII, c. 5, 6, 7, 8, 13.
10 W. N. Osborough, ‘Ecclesiastical law and the Reformation in Ireland’ in R. H. Helmholz (ed.),

Canon law in Protestant lands (Berlin, 1992), pp. 223–52.
11 28 Hen. VIII, c. 5: ‘Forasmuch as this land of Ireland is depending and belonging justly and rightfully

to the imperial crown of England’.
12 28 Hen. VIII, c. 15; Seán Duffy, ‘The problem of degeneracy’ in James Lydon (ed.), Law and disorder

in thirteenth-century Ireland: the Dublin parliament of 1297 (Dublin, 1997), pp. 87–106; James Lydon,
‘The middle nation’ in James Lydon (ed.), England and Ireland in the later middle ages (Dublin,
1981), pp. 1–26.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 5

which eventually led to a Protestant establishment, then this Act can be
seen as linking Ireland’s medieval past to its future as a Protestant kingdom.
The 1537 statute insisted that benefices be given to English speakers unless
all efforts to locate one had failed. In that event, each priest was to take
an oath at ordination to endeavour to learn the ‘English tongue . . . to
the uttermost of his power, wit and cunning’. Having done so, he was to
instruct his flock in the same, so that the cleric now became an instrument
of anglicisation in a church of which Henry and his heirs would be supreme
heads. This church made the acquisition and spread of English language
and manners a priority. The result was that evangelisation through Irish
was regarded as at best maverick but more usually as suspect.13 So, from
the very outset, Westminster statutes were exported whole and then made
law in a neighbouring kingdom which had a very different past and a very
different present.

The 1541 Act for Kingly Title offered a new future by superseding the
medieval Lordship. The snag was that the future on offer was predicated
on England’s, not Ireland’s, past. Henry VIII attempted by strategy, by
policy and by law to turn all of the inhabitants of Ireland into his obedient
subjects and into Englishmen and Englishwomen and lead them into schism
with Rome all at once. If, as seems the case, it was a ‘habit’ of obedience
that turned English subjects into Protestants in the long term and made
religious change there a success, then there was no comparable ‘habit’ to
build on in Ireland. Here was a brand new synthetic kingdom, all head
and no body, enjoying no coronation, no coronation oath and no separate
proclamation. This made it different from the far older kingdom of England
and, in time, the other older kingdom of Scotland. It also threw up another
problem which grew steadily more acute over the next hundred years. The
infant kingdom was neither fish nor fowl because Irish policy was neither
purely domestic policy nor was it purely foreign policy. It was both rolled,
maddeningly, into one. Pope Paul III had glimpsed this when he sent his two
Jesuits on reconnaissance, and, when Propaganda Fide came into existence
in 1622, it paid special attention to this overwhelmingly Catholic realm as a
key European theatre. Yet dazzled by what was, in relative terms, stunning
success in England, lords deputy, judges and clerics moving across the Irish
Sea to impose the Henrician and its successor settlements could not usually
get beyond the seductive similarity. This meant that a paper kingdom was
to get a paper reformation.

13 Nicholas Williams, I bprionta i leabhar: na protastúin agus prós na Gaeilge, 1567–1724 (Baile Átha
Cliath, 1986).


6 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

The kingdom of Ireland was at once a jewel of Cromwellian reform
and an embarrassing little itch. The itch was an old one begun in the
twelfth century as a kind present of the English pope Adrian IV, who was
believed to have granted Ireland to Henry II in exchange for overhauling its
anachronistic (barbaric, if you were John of Salisbury) church practices.14

The 1541 statute rather lamely overcame Adrian’s Laudabiliter by declaring
that the ‘king of England is and is of right’ the king of Ireland. Otherwise
English dominion over the smaller island might have been construed as
dependent on papal grant. The catch was that the Old English population
took Laudabiliter to be their charter, their mandate to ‘tame’ the wild Irish.
To their mind, denial of the papal bull might be understood as denial of
their right to exist as a community.15

The twelfth century had other claims on the attention of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century ecclesiastics and governors. Councils convened in 1111
and 1152 had, despite some later unions and amalgamations, given the island
over twenty dioceses.16 The number, size and boundaries of these sees made
up a lovely still life of power relations in 1152, but had a deleterious effect on
the new Tudor Ecclesia Hibernicana. Most bishoprics were poor and many
had inchoate or almost vestigial parish structures. It turned into a poisoned
chalice for the state church. Places like Killaloe, Cloyne, Ferns, Kilfenora,
Leighlin, Dromore – indeed the vast majority of sites – were complete
backwaters and usually ruinous by the early modern period. The claim to
be a national church, the very title of the Church of Ireland, meant that civil
and religious authorities shied away from proposals for extensive unions
and relocations of cathedral churches to more populous centres.17 Inherited
canon law carried with it a claim to exclusive jurisdiction.18 Impoverished
bishops began to lease see lands with manic intensity. Residence in the
hotspots of four centuries earlier was so unappealing that prelates gravi-
tated to Dublin. Tudor and Stuart monarchs found it almost impossible
to give away dioceses like Ardfert and Kilmore. Church of Ireland bishops,

14 See J. A. Watt, The church and the two nations in medieval Ireland (Oxford, 1970), ch. 1, for an
overview.

15 James Murray, ‘The diocese of Dublin in the sixteenth century: clerical opposition and the failure
of the Reformation’ in James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (eds.), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin
(Dublin, 2000), pp. 92–111.

16 It is not surprising that 26 Hen. VIII, c. 14 (Eng.), the suffragan bishops Act of 1534, was not proposed
for Ireland.

17 See chapter 4 below and John McCafferty, ‘Protestant prelates or godly pastors? The dilemma of the
early Stuart episcopate’ in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The origins of sectarianism in early
modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 54–72.

18 Osborough, ‘Ecclesiastical law’, pp. 223–52.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 7

faced with the erosion of landed endowments, proceeded to corrosive abuse
of jurisdiction and flagrant pluralism simply to make ends meet. Discredit
followed on dilapidation. Catholic commentators, as in the Annals of the
Four Masters, took delight in declaring that the reformation was propelled
by avarice and rapine.19 Many of the patentee bishops who had no previous
Irish career, or had only a very brief one, found themselves strangers in a
strange land, disliked and alien. Their troubles were compounded by the
defiant existence of vicars apostolic and, worse, from the 1610s onwards,
a rival episcopate who used identical titles and had shadow officials and
courts all modelled on the exact same medieval structures. The Roman
bishops were often locals, sons of the well-connected, who were supported
by voluntary contributions; they were not shackled to crumbling cathe-
drals and were free to work in the towns that counted.20 Many of the old
cities possessed chartered liberties which allowed corporations to hamper
the state church if they chose – and some chose to do so.21 Examples of the
ways in which the medieval past turned out to be a noxious inheritance
for the Church of Ireland and a balm to the illegal counter-church can
easily be multiplied. The moral of the story is that what ended by working
well in England often backfired in Ireland. Elizabeth’s achievement was, as
Conrad Russell has said, the creation of a church ‘which looked Catholic
and sounded Protestant’ by virtue of its resting on so many medieval foun-
dations.22 Her Church of England worked out to be a blend, but her Church
of Ireland curdled.

Even dissolution of the monasteries, the great fissure in English religious
life, which did so much to secure aristocratic and landed acquiescence,
played out in almost farcical reverse on the other side of the water. By
the 1570s, as Colm Lennon has shown, Old English impropriators were
siphoning off the profits of dissolution to pay for the upkeep of the new
seminary clerics. ‘Massing’ priests in the Dublin area were often better off

19 John O’Donovan (ed. and trans.), Annála rı́oghachta Éireann: Annals of the kingdom of Ireland by
the Four Masters from the earliest times to the year 1616, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1851), p. 1445; RIA MS 23 P7
fols. 54v–55r.

20 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic reformation in Ireland (Oxford, 2002), ch. 2, ‘Development and
reform in the Irish church, 1618–1645’; P. J. Corish, ‘The reorganisation of the Irish Church,
1603–1641’, Proceedings of the Irish Catholic Committee (1957), 9–14; Donal Cregan, ‘The social
and cultural background of a counter-reformation episcopate 1618–60’ in Art Cosgrove and
Donal MacCartney (eds.), Studies in Irish history presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979),
pp. 85–117.

21 A. J. Sheehan, ‘The recusancy revolt of 1603: a reinterpretation’, Archivium Hibernicum 38 (1983),
3–13.

22 Conrad Russell, ‘The reformation and the creation of the Church of England, 1500–1640’ in John
Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (1996), p. 280.


8 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

than the established church incumbents. Here at least the pope did better
from dissolution than the king.23

Recusants hugged Ireland’s medieval practices to themselves. They con-
trived to ‘disremember’ the manifold abuses and bitter divisions and so
adroitly turn past centuries into an age of faith. The literary expression
of this medievalism deserves separate consideration. On the ground it was
played out by persistent pilgrimage. A life of St Kevin of Glendalough
(surviving in eighteenth-century recension) identifies ‘4 chief pilgrimages
of Erin’ – one for each province – St Patrick’s Purgatory, Croagh Patrick, Inis
na mBeo (the isle of the living) or Monaincha in Co. Tipperary and Glen-
dalough. Gerald of Wales mentions several of them in his Topographia.24

Custom and lack of state intervention kept them alive, but the counter-
reformation episcopate adroitly colonised them and turned them into state-
ments about survival as well as sanctity. Cornelius O’Devany of Down and
Connor (executed in 1612) made his devotions at Monaincha and Francis
Kirwan of Killala did the rounds at Lough Derg shortly after Spottis-
woode’s wrecking.25 In response to lobbying by Irish exiles, popes Paul V
and Clement VIII attached plenary indulgences to the four ‘national’ pil-
grimages as well as highly localised ones such as St Gobnait in west Cork.26

Prayers for the extirpation of heresy from Ireland were mandatory for suc-
cessful receipt of the indulgence. Catholic apologists gleefully pointed out
the island’s prior freedom from stain of heresy and apparent lack of anti-
clericalism. In this view, not only was there no reformation from ‘below’
but the island also exhibited an exceptional purity of faith which deserved
to be guarded at all costs.27

Protestant engagements with the earlier centuries were less assured.
Dublin Castle could not erase older practices and readings of medieval
authors were beguiling but harmful. Cambrensis remained required reading

23 Lennon, The lords of Dublin, pp. 144–50.
24 Charles Plummer, Bethada náem na nÉrenn: Lives of Irish saints, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1922), vol. 2, p. 156.
25 P. F. Moran (ed.), Analecta Sacra, p. ciii; C. P. Meehan (ed.), The portrait of a pious bishop; or the life

and death of the Most Reverend Francis Kirwan, bishop of Killala. Translated from the Latin of John
Lynch, archdeacon of Tuam (Dublin, 1864), pp. 83–7.

26 John Hagan (ed.), ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica’, Archivium Hibernicum 3 (1914), 263–4; D. Ó
hÉaluighthe, ‘St Gobnet of Ballyvourney’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society
72 (1952), 43–61 at p. 51, quoting from Lambeth Palace library, Carew MS, vol. 621.

27 For typical expressions of this sentiment, see B. B. [Robert Rochford], The life of the glorious S.
Patricke apostle and primate together with the lives of the holy virgin S. Bridgit and of the glorious abbot
Saint Columbe, Patrons of Ireland (St Omer, 1625), pp. ii–xvi and I. C. [John Copinger], The theatre
of Catholique and Protestant religion diuided into twelue bookes (St Omer, 1620). John McCafferty,
‘Mirabilis in sanctis suis: the communion of saints and Catholic reformation in early seventeenth-
century Ireland’ in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Community in early modern
Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 199–214.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 9

for administrators, soldiers and settlers, but his writings, especially trans-
lated, had a deleterious effect on those readers.28 Gerald made it too easy –
too easy to read ‘Catholic’ for ‘barbarian’, too easy to believe the Irish
‘problem’ was one, the same, unchanging. Writing to Laud in winter
1633, Wentworth spelled out a list of ecclesiastical abuses which are so
similar to Archbishop Lanfranc’s that there is a temptation to believe in
reincarnation.29 The concluding sections of the Expugnatio (on how Ire-
land should be governed) made it far too easy to believe in a quick and
easy fix. Viceroy after viceroy read Gerald in Holinshed and Camden and
fell under the spell. By the time they had shaken it off they had usually
been recalled or burnt out.30 Sir John Davies’s cunning plan to use only
pre-reformation statutes in pursuit of the ‘mandates’ campaign did not
exactly evoke warm feelings about the ancient legitimacy of the Church of
Ireland.31 James Ussher’s sophisticated attempt in 1622 to recast Patrick as
Protestant and Irish monks as proto-dons caused no known conversions.
In 1632, a joint Old English and Gaelic Irish campaign, headed up by the
Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding, had Patrick placed in the Roman brev-
iary. Muirchú’s seventh-century Moses of Armagh became a Tridentine
Moses for a seventeenth-century Catholic nation. Wadding’s patriarch did
far better than Ussher’s puritan.32

There is a grave temptation to ask when it was ‘all over’ for Protestantism
in Ireland. It was never ‘all over’, of course. There have been arguments that
the Church of Ireland sank into a state of sulky pessimism, but nobody

28 Hiram Morgan, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor conquest of Ireland’ in Hiram Morgan (ed.),
Political ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 22–44; Nicholas Canny, ‘The attempted
anglicisation of Ireland in the seventeenth century: an exemplar of “British history”’ in J. F. Merritt
(ed.), The political world of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 157–
86; Richard Anthony McCabe, ‘Making history: Holinshed’s Irish Chronicles, 1577 and 1587’ in David
J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds.), British identities and English renaissance literature (Cambridge, 2002),
pp. 51–67.

29 Wentworth to Laud, 31 January 1634, Knowler I, p. 187.
30 Ciaran Brady, ‘England’s defence and Ireland’s reform: the dilemma of the Irish viceroys, 1541–1641’

in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British problem, c.1534–1707: state formation in
the Atlantic archipelago (1996), pp. 89–117.

31 John McCavitt, ‘Lord Deputy Chichester and the English government’s “mandates policy” in Ireland
1605–7’, Recusant History 20 (1990), 320–55; Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the conquest of
Ireland (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 103–21.

32 Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘“The most adaptable of saints”: the cult of St
Patrick in the seventeenth century’, Archivium Hibernicum 49 (1995), 82–104; Alan Ford, ‘James
Ussher and the creation of an Irish Protestant identity’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts
(eds.), British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 185–
212; Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Protestant interpretation of the history of Ireland: the case of James
Ussher’s Discourse’ in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant history and identity in sixteenth-century Europe,
vol. II, The later reformation (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 107–20; John McCafferty, ‘St Patrick for the
Church of Ireland: James Ussher’s Discourse’, Bullán 3 (1997–8), 87–101.


10 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

was ever going to say, or even think, the reformed future lay exclusively
with immigrants, because to do so would have been to undermine its
very existence as a Christian church. Timing is important but not as a
means of determining the year of which it could be said that Ireland was
not going to be Protestant. It is important to recall that when James VI
acceded to the English throne in 1603 his arrival inaugurated a period of
comparative peace lasting up to 1641 and for the first time the state could,
if it chose to, contemplate a thorough reformation all across Ireland. It is,
however, equally important to remember the relationship between timing
and the Englishness of the reformation: England’s reformation had its own
velocity and its own critical junctures such as 1534, 1559, 1571 and 1611.
The outcomes of those dates, the products of England’s own journey to
Protestantism, were then, respectively, introduced into Ireland at points in
its own historical trajectory – 1536, 1560, 1634 and 1611. None of them –
Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the Prayer Book, the Thirty-Nine articles, the
Authorised Version of the Bible – were designed for or were remotely in
response to Irish conditions.

Ireland’s binary life as foreign and domestic matter had an effect on legal
enforcement of the religious settlement. More than once recusants had it
both ways. During negotiations for the Spanish match in 1623 James permit-
ted de facto toleration, yet in 1625, when his son went to war with Spain,
threat of invasion made it imperative to compromise with Old English
Catholics, so uniformity went out the window and talks began on con-
cessions.33 Even the 1607 mandates scheme, which rested on creative use
of prerogative powers, was suspended for policy reasons and not for legal
ones. As Church of Ireland clergy endlessly pointed out, political goals took
precedence. If the Irish kingdom had been more real and the English church
settlement less secure, things might have been different but, as it was, the
gospel invariably lagged behind government. As a result, the Church of
Ireland lacked definition, lacked form for far too long. By the time James
began to fill up the vacancies left by Elizabeth, the Catholics had begun on
their counter-hierarchy. Until 1615 the Church of Ireland had no formu-
lary beyond a Dublin promulgation of Matthew Parker’s Eleven articles of
1559. The Thirty-Nine articles were not received until 1634. Translations
of scripture and service books were long delayed. A brief catechism was
issued in 1567 (really as a response to the apparent Presbyterianism of John
Carswell’s Gaelic translation of the Book of Common Order). There was no
Prayer Book until 1608 and no Old Testament until 1685. This compares, as

33 Clarke, Old English, chs. 2–3.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 11

many scholars have pointed out, woefully with Wales.34 Endless squabbling
over the secularisation of St Patrick’s cathedral delayed the foundation of
Dublin University as a Protestant seminary until 1591. By then, even as the
royal charter admitted, wealthy Dubliners were sending their sons out to
continental colleges.35 As late as 1615 it was still necessary for the Church of
Ireland to include an attack on private masses in their first formulary and the
1634 canons gave directions for the removal of monuments of superstition
from churches.

Under Mary in England, churchwardens unwrapped and re-erected con-
cealed rood crosses and other objects – there is almost no parallel in Ireland
because nothing had been taken down. The vast majority of Marian bish-
ops stayed on in Elizabeth’s Church of Ireland.36 Mary’s Irish reign was so
far from being the last gasp of Catholicism that her most enduring legacy
to her successors was papal reconfirmation of the kingly title, which cut the
Gordian knot as it superseded Laudabiliter and so paved the way for effec-
tive recusant allegiance to the crown. When the Spanish armada pushed
Englishness and Protestantism into hypostatic union, those arriving from
the ‘beleaguered isle’ had either no memory of Catholicism or a very dim
one. They found a kingdom which bore a paper resemblance to their own
to be nightmarish, alien, a scandal.

Those who made careers in the new kingdom and who were charged with
reducing it to conformity found even the paper resemblance to be deceptive.
The church was established by law differently and the means of ‘compelling
them in’ was quite different too. Under the Irish Uniformity Act, non-
attendance at parish churches meant only a fine of 12d.37 Supplementary
penalties did not make it through parliament, as Old English wrecking in
1585–6 and in 1613–15 clearly showed. There was the option of prerogative
power – as in the 1605 proclamation against seminary priests – but this
was always subject to political override. The Irish Uniformity Act of 1560
permitted Latin services in all parishes, allowed the 1549 Prayer Book and
vestments, as at 2 Edward VI. Small wonder that the large Marian episcopate

34 Bradshaw, ‘The English reformation and identity formation’, pp. 43–111; Ciaran Brady, ‘Comparable
histories? Tudor reform in Wales and Ireland’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and
union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (1995), pp. 64–86; Philip Jenkins, ‘The Anglican Church
and the unity of Britain: the Welsh experience, 1560–1714’ in Ellis and Barber (eds.), Conquest and
union, pp. 115–38.

35 James Murray, ‘St Patrick’s Cathedral and the university question in Ireland c. 1547–1585’ in Helga
Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European universities in the age of reformation and counter-reformation
(Dublin, 1998), pp. 1–33.

36 Henry A. Jefferies, ‘The Irish Parliament of 1560: the anglican reforms authorised’, IHS 26 (1988),
128–41.

37 2 Eliz. I, c. 2.


12 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

made legal services look as old-fashioned or, to English eyes, as popish as
possible. Most of the new English were so hardwired to think in terms of
England that they frequently assumed Westminster statutes were current in
Ireland. In 1611 Andrew Knox of Raphoe (who was Scottish, as it happens)
secured royal permission for imposing the oath of allegiance on prominent
Catholics in each diocese. The snag was that the oath was based on an
English Act of 1606 which had not been brought in by Dublin and so there
were no statutory punishments for those who refused the oath. In 1604, after
forty-six years’ Irish service, Chief Justice William Saxey of the Munster
Presidency Court urged enforcement of a statute of 27 Elizabeth for the
deportation of Jesuits and seminary priests. It was not on the Irish statute
book.38 Old English recusants came to specialise in these very legal niceties.
Even when action was correctly taken, juries failed to indict, and would
not do so even after fining and imprisonment. Mayors and civic officers
used their charter privileges and other cunning legal ploys to avoid oaths
of supremacy. As Elizabeth’s reign wore on, more and more of them stayed
away from civic religious services. Law, legal process and civic bodies were
motors of Protestantisation in England. In Ireland they were frequently
turned on their heads.

Legal ambiguity was just one element in the miasma of confusion and
rumour that hung over Dublin Castle and its servants. Rumour could be
spectacular – such as in 1603 when many Munster towns decided James was
about to tolerate Catholicism. They ejected Protestant clergy and refused
to admit the lord deputy. In 1614, distance from the centre allowed a recu-
sant delegation to report, on return from London, that James had, again,
conceded toleration. It was some time before Lord Deputy Chichester
could repair the damage done to his own position.39 More niggling errors
abounded. Archbishop Laud confused the Council of Cashel (1172) with
Castle Chamber (the Irish Star Chamber).40 Bernard Adams was offered
Kilfenora and Dromore together in 1605, which was the Irish geographical
equivalent of being granted Ely along with Bath and Wells. Only eleven
years after the first Irish convocation in 1615, nobody appeared to be sure

38 Alan Ford, ‘“Firm Catholics” or “loyal subjects”: religious and political allegiance in early seventeenth-
century Ireland’ in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Politi-
cal discourse in seventeenth and eighteenth century Ireland (2001), pp. 1–31 quoting BL Add. MS
4756, fol. 63v; Pawlisch, Sir John Davies, pp. 107–8. For a brief discussion of the applicabil-
ity of English statutes to Ireland, see J. H. Baker, ‘United and knit to the imperial crown’ in
D. S. Greer and N. M. Dawson (eds.), Mysteries and solutions in Irish legal history (Dublin, 2001),
pp. 51–72.

39 John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester: lord deputy of Ireland, 1605–16 (Belfast, 1998), pp. 190–5.
40 Laud to Bramhall, 1 October 1634, HA 15156.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 13

whether their 101 articles had been licensed or approved by the king.41

Much of this is trivial, the fruit of distance, bad record keeping and cursory
research but, in a magisterial reformation which commanded almost no
popular support, confusion and delay were deadly dangerous.

While the crown employed politic drifts with little in the way of sober
persuasions, Catholicism just would not go away. William Prynne would
argue that the sight of habited friars on Irish streets was proof of Went-
worth’s laxity and leanings. Had he visited Ireland at any time he would
have learnt that they had never gone away. Donegal friary, a key Franciscan
house, functioned up to 1607. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign only 55 per
cent of 140 monasteries and 40 per cent of about 200 mendicant houses
had been suppressed. Chantries and guilds were never abolished. While
some guilds, like St Anne’s in Dublin, as Colm Lennon has shown, did go
through a neutral ‘mercantile investment club’ phase, many of these surviv-
ing medieval institutions were ready to dock with the sodalities and dynamic
lay pieties of imported Tridentine Catholicism.42 Writing to Walsingham
in June 1580, Marmaduke Midleton of Waterford and Lismore complained
that ‘the windows and walls of the churches [are] full of images. They
will not deface them, and I dare not for fear of tumult.’43 Official icono-
clasm more or less began and ended in 1540–1 and focused on high-profile
relics such as the Bachall Ísu in Christchurch and the image of Our Lady
of Trim. The fabric remained intact in many parish churches for many
years. As late as 1631, there were churches in the Dublin area which were in
Catholic hands.44 The dead began to declare allegiance as burials switched
to ruined abbeys and friaries. The living openly pullulated about holy wells
even on the very outskirts of Dublin, the royal capital. Others ostenta-
tiously celebrated Easter according to the new Gregorian calendar.45 In the
heart of cities mass houses were opulently fitted out, barely discreet.46 On
St Stephen’s Day 1629 a raid on a Carmelite house on Cook street ended
with Lancelot Bulkeley, Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, and a

41 James VI & I to Chichester, 4 October 1605, Cal. SP Ire. 1603–6, p. 331. See chapter 3 below.
42 Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-century Ireland: the incomplete conquest (Dublin, 1994); ‘The chantries in

the Irish reformation: the case of St Anne’s Guild, Dublin, 1550–1630’ in R. V. Comerford, Mary
Cullen, Jacqueline R. Hill and Colm Lennon (eds.), Religion, conflict and coexistence in Ireland
(Dublin, 1990), pp. 6–25.

43 W. Maziere Brady (ed.), State papers concerning the Irish church in the time of Queen Elizabeth (1868),
p. 40.

44 Myles Ronan (ed.), ‘Archbishop Bulkeley’s visitation of Dublin, 1630’, Archivium Hibernicum 8
(1941), 56–98.

45 Hiram Morgan, ‘“Faith & fatherland” in sixteenth-century Ireland’, History Ireland 3:2 (1995), 13–20.
46 Meehan (ed.), Portrait of a pious bishop, pp. 73–4.


14 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

detachment of musketeers fleeing for the safety of the castle under a hail of
stones from furious worshippers. Four aldermen stood by and watched.47

Catholicism could never become ‘old-time’ religion in Ireland because
it never went away, not even for a little. Timing played a large part in the
sense that old late medieval ways persisted long enough to be transformed
into new Tridentine ways. Yet the majority did more than ‘keep the faith’ –
they created, over time, an equation of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Catholic’.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs infused the blood of the saints into the veins
of English Protestantism. The blood of Edmund Campion and Margaret
Clitheroe was a sign of the seriousness of the state-sponsored ecclesiastical
settlement. Public executions in Ireland, as Clodagh Tait has shown, were
very often the outcome of treason legislation and turned what was supposed
to be a salutary public spectacle on its head in an environment in which it
was a minority hanging members of the religious majority.48 Bishop Conor
O’Devaney’s 1612 martyrdom was amongst the last. Thousands turned out
to watch his procession to the gallows and so to express their hostility to
the government: ‘and the Catholics despising the danger, cast themselves
upon their knees to ask the bishop’s blessing, which he gave them to satisfy
their devotion and the blows and kicks of the heretics not sufficient to
deter them’. They came not to mock but rather to be humble pilgrims and
the authorities were powerless to stop the open rush for relics. The new
martyr cults became a badge of orthodoxy for Catholics in Ireland and
abroad.49

The gallows also became a venue for the display of sectarian sentiment.
On 18 November 1581 the Baltinglass rebels approached the scaffold, reciting
the Ave Maria. When approached by Thomas Jones, Church of Ireland
minister, they shouted ‘vade satana, vade satana, vade post me satana’.50

Once choices had been made early in Elizabeth’s reign, there were very
few conversions either way as sectarian identity froze out religious choice.
Irish Protestants were saturated with the apocalyptic anti-Catholicism of
their English origins. At the same time, many Catholics in Ireland began to
articulate an anti-Protestantism which insisted on these very same English
origins. In their entry for 1537, Mı́cheál Ó Cléirigh and his associates noted:
‘a heresy and new error sprang up in England through pride, vain-glory,

47 P. F. Moran, History of the Catholic archbishops of Dublin (Dublin 1864), pp. 317–19; Brendan Jennings
(ed.), Wadding Papers 1614–38 (Dublin, 1953), pp. 331–2.

48 Alan Ford, ‘Martyrdom, history and memory in early modern Ireland’ in Ian Mcbride (ed.), History
and memory in modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 43–66; Clodagh Tait, ‘Adored for saints:
Catholic martyrdom in Ireland c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History 5 (2001), 128–59.

49 Tait, ‘Adored’, pp. 155–9. 50 M. V. Ronan, Irish martyrs of the penal laws (1935), p. 50.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 15

avarice and lust . . . so that the men of England went into opposition to the
Pope and Rome [and] they also appointed bishops for themselves’.51

Most of those who went to see O’Devaney and his companion die were
Old English descendants of the medieval colonists. They were defiantly
recusant and frenziedly pious, yet the object of their devotion was a Gaelic
Irish bishop. Less than a hundred years previously, in 1518, the Dublin
provincial synod banned clergy from Connacht and Ulster – Gaelic Irish
zones.52 This shift at the very heart of the Pale, place of ancient English
settlement in Ireland, was important. It pointed to a break with centuries
of history.

The Old English, Anglo-Hibernici, ancient and loyal subjects of the
crown, remained predominantly recusant. Much has been written about
why this happened and why they drifted away from even church papistry
at an early stage. The main arguments can be condensed as follows. Apart
from lower clergy, most of the political community of the Englishry wel-
comed Henry’s reforms. Over time, and as the new kingdom failed to get
off the ground, Mary’s then Elizabeth’s government drifted towards coer-
cion, confiscation, plantation and general conquest. All of these measures
were not necessarily distasteful to the Old English as they had all been
advocated by the English in Ireland since Richard II’s failed settlement.53

Conquest was expensive and much of the cost fell on the ancient subjects.
At the same time a further class of subject – the New English – sprang into
being. They treated the kingdom, it appeared, as their own particular booty.
When the old interest blocked parliamentary subsidy, viceroys desperate
for ‘spectacular’ fixes resorted to prerogative powers and cessed the landed
Palesmen heavily. The Old English were compelled to defend their rights.
In this way, English reformation administered by New English Protestants
worked its particular alchemy by causing the ancient subjects to identify
their ancient religion with their ancient liberties.

While the Old English prosecuted what Ciaran Brady has called a strat-
egy of ‘conservative subversion’ through legal devices and appeals direct to
the monarch, the history of sixteenth-century Ireland is not merely one
of brinkmanship. Crown policy provoked rebellion from both Gaelic Irish
and Old English lords and as soon as it was possible to do so, confessional

51 O’Donovan (ed. and trans.), Annála rı́oghachta Éireann, p. 1445; RIA MS 23 P7 fols. 54v–55r.
52 Red Book of Ossory, fol. 15v. I am grateful to Gerald Bray for a copy of this text, which forms part

of his project to publish convocation records covering Britain and Ireland from the Middle Ages to
the nineteenth century, Records of the Irish Councils, synods and convocations 1101–1704, unpublished
edn (Birmingham, AL, 2001), p. 155.

53 Dorothy Johnston, ‘The interim years: Richard II and Ireland, 1395–1399’ in James Lydon (ed.),
England and Ireland in the later Middle Ages (Dublin, 1981), pp. 175–95.


16 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

polemic was deployed as a weapon. When Silken Thomas Fitzgerald began
his baronial revolt in 1534, he dispatched his chaplain to Rome with instruc-
tions to present him as a crusader against a heretical king.54 In 1579, James
Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald explained his insurrection was against a queen who
had deprived herself: ‘thus, then, we are not at war against the honourable
and legitimate crown of England but against a she-tyrant who, by refusing
to hear Christ in the person of his vicar and even by daring to subject the
church of Christ to a woman in matters of faith, on which she has no right
to pronounce has deservedly forfeited her royal authority’.55 When James,
second Viscount Baltinglass, took up arms shortly afterwards he asserted:
‘he is no Christian man that [can] think and believe that a woman uncap
of all holy orders should be supreme governor of Christ’s church a thing
Christ did not grant unto his own mother’.56 Lord Grey’s ferocious reac-
tion to the Baltinglass revolt led to a shocking wave of arrests, executions
and even confiscations within a Pale which had not turned out in sup-
port of the insurgents. By 1599, Hugh O’Neill was demanding complete
restoration of Catholic church properties and that ‘the Church of Ireland be
wholly governed by the pope’. Robert Cecil scratched ‘utopia’ on his own
copy of O’Neill’s articles.57 Fulminations against Elizabeth and the fan-
tastical demands of her government may have had little currency beyond
the immediate political situations that generated them, but they also con-
tributed to a sense that not only was Catholicism visible but that it was also
violently visible. Gradually a split emerged between those who advocated
dual loyalty and hoped for tacit toleration with some guarantees or, in their
wilder moments, official toleration and those who pushed for a more sweep-
ing change. This position, usually urged by émigrés, consisted of handing
Ireland over to the Spanish crown and was based on the union of Philip
and Mary. The Catholic primate, Peter Lombard, first went for the Spanish
option but gravitated to the other after the death of O’Neill and accession
of James I.58

54 Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Foreign involvement in the revolt of Silken Thomas, 1534–5’, Proceedings of the
Royal Irish Academy, section C, 96 (1996), 49–66.

55 M. V. Ronan, The reformation in Ireland under Elizabeth 1558–1580 (1930), p. 620.
56 James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglass, to Ormond, July 1580, PRO SP 63/74/64(i); Lambeth Palace

Library MS 597, fo. 406; Cal. Carew MSS, 1575–88, no. 443.
57 Morgan, ‘“Faith & fatherland”’; Hiram Morgan, ‘Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years War in Tudor

Ireland’, HJ 36 (1993), 21–37.
58 Thomas O’Connor, ‘A justification for foreign intervention in early modern Ireland: Peter Lombard’s

Commentarius (1600)’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish migrants in Europe
after Kinsale (Dublin 2003), pp. 14–31; John J. Silke, ‘Later relations between Primate Peter Lombard
and Hugh O’Neill’, Irish Theological Quarterly 22 (1955), 15–30; ‘Primate Lombard and James I’, Irish
Theological Quarterly 22 (1955), 124–50.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 17

Lombard’s changeover reflects a deeper movement. All the sixteenth-
century rebels had different aims and all their revolts had different causes
and none, of course, was just about religion. Yet one thing did become more
manifest over time. They were concerned about the position of Catholics
in Ireland – not just the Old English alone or Gaelic Irish alone – but all
Catholics in all of Ireland. Catholic Ireland had arrived. Like Protestant
England, it took time in the coming and it was never absolute but it had,
nonetheless, arrived.

The Irish language was as instrumental in the birth of Catholic
Ireland as conservative subversions and outright rebellions. Because Protes-
tant reformers were generally hostile to the Gaelic vernacular and because
the language collapsed so spectacularly in later centuries it has often been
tempting to dismiss it or treat it as a spent force. No one denies that the
vernacular was the star of the English reformation from Cranmer to the
Authorised Version. Just as it triumphed in England, it was a damp squib
in Ireland where Gaelic became the star of Catholic reform. Europe’s oldest
written vernacular was far from being an ebbing tide. It allowed completely
new connections that helped guarantee that Ireland would remain Catholic.

There was a reactive quality to Catholic apologistics. Historians, annal-
ists and genealogists sought to deny the equation of Catholicism with
barbarity – itself a confessional twist on a long-established manner of writ-
ing about Ireland.59 They unleashed a torrent of publications – in Latin
for an international audience – and in Irish for the domestic and emi-
grant readers and hearers. They presented the country to themselves and
to Catholic Europe as an island of saints and scholars and as an ancient,
civilised and irreducibly Catholic kingdom. The ‘four masters’ structured
their annals as a compendium of the history of the entire island as a sin-
gle unit.60 The secular priest Seathrun Céitinn offered his refutation of
Giraldus as Foras feasa ar Éirinn, which translates as ‘collection of wisdom
about Ireland’. In order to make the case, they had to remake the language.
Three neologisms stand out – náisiun (nation) used along with Catholic;

59 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The culture and identity of Irish Franciscan historians at Louvain 1607–
1650’ in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the historians (Dublin, 1991), pp. 11–30; Clare Carroll, Circe’s
cup: cultural transformations in early modern writing about Ireland (Cork, 2001), pp. 104–34; Brendan
Jennings, Michael O Cleirigh, chief of the Four Masters, and his associates (Dublin, 1936); Colm
Lennon, ‘Taking sides: the emergence of Irish Catholic ideology’ in Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-
Heumann (eds.), Taking sides: colonial and confessional mentalités in early modern Ireland (Dublin,
2003), pp. 78–93; Canice Mooney, ‘Father John Colgan, OFM, his work, times and literary milieu’
in Terence O’Donnell (ed.), Father John Colgan OFM, 1592–1658 (Dublin, 1959), pp. 7–40; Richard
Sharpe, Medieval Irish saints’ lives: an introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford, 1991), ch. 2.

60 In both the Annals and the Genealogiae regum et sanctorum Hiberniae completion dates were indicated
by Mı́cheál Ó Cléirigh using the regnal years of Charles I.


18 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

creideamh agus athartha (faith and fatherland) and finally Éireannaigh (Irish)
to denote all of the inhabitants of the island regardless of their descent: an
Irish Catholic nation able to fuse Old English loyalism with the Gaelic pas-
sion for genealogy when James Stuart took the throne. Aodh MacAingil,
Lombard’s successor in Armagh, extolled James as ‘ar rı́ uasal óirdheirc’ (our
noble illustrious king). He even went on to prove by convoluted casuistry
that James was not, in fact, a heretic at all. Gaelic poets alluded to the three
crowns in James VI & I’s charter and supplied him with lavish genealogies.
So the kingdom of Ireland itself had arrived but in a Catholic guise and
with a Gaelic tongue. This deep engagement between Catholics and Stuarts
was destined to be amazingly enduring as recusant thinking came to settle
firmly on securing rights under this Scottish dynasty.61

The language was not exclusively kept for political theory and praise
poetry; it also bore directly on the competition for souls in the early modern
period. By turning their backs on Gaelic, Church of Ireland theologians
engaged with Catholicism exactly as if they had been in Cambridge, Oxford
or the king’s Chelsea College.62 The Dublin printing press churned out
apologetical and polemical pamphlets which were in every respect identical
to those printed across the Irish Sea. The Gaelic typeface at Louvain stamped
out Bonabhentura Ó hEoghusa’s uncompromisingly counter-reformation
Teagasg Crı́osdaidhe (catechism); Flaithre Ó Maolconaire’s Desiderius was
based on a popular Spanish text of the devotio moderna and Mac Aingil’s
tract on confession Scáthán Shacramuinte na Aithridhe was based on the
teaching on the fourteenth session of the Council of Trent.63 Apart from

61 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Geoffrey Keating: apologist of Irish Ireland’ in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew
Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.), Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict 1534–
1660 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 166–90; Marc Caball, Poets and poetry: continuity and reaction in Irish
poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork, 1998); ‘Innovation and tradition: Irish Gaelic responses to early modern
conquest and colonization’ in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin,
1999), pp. 62–82; Bernadette Cunningham, The world of Geoffrey Keating (Dublin, 2000); Mı́cheál
Mac Craith, ‘The Gaelic reaction to the Reformation’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.),
Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (1995), pp. 139–61; ‘Creideamh agus athartha:
idéoloaı́ocht pholait́ıochta agus aos léinn na Gaeilge i dthús an seachtú haois déag’ in Máiŕın Nı́
Dhonnchadha (ed.), Nua-léamha: gnéithe de chultúr, stair agus polaitı́ocht na hÉireann, c1600–c1900
(Baile Átha Cliath, 1996), pp. 7–19; Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Annála Rı́oghachta Éireann agus Foras
Feasa ar Éirinn: an comhtheacs comhaimseartha’, Studia Hibernica 22–3 (1982–3), 59–105; Aisling
ghéar: na Stiobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn (Baile Átha Cliath, 1996).

62 Declan Gaffney, ‘The practice of religious controversy in Dublin, 1600–1641’ in W. J. Sheils and D.
Wood (eds.), The churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History 25 (Oxford, 1989), pp.
145–58; Brian Jackson, ‘The construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious
controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614’ in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British interventions
in early modern Ireland (2005), pp. 97–115; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and
Protestant churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 32–3.

63 Old English Catholics also had access to the large English-language output of the Douai, Rouen
and St Omer presses.


Prologue: Ireland’s English reformation 19

Seaán Ó Cearnaigh and William Bedell’s short and basic catechisms, the
Church of Ireland had no indigenous pastoral publications.

Irish poetry also played its part in deploying sectarian invective and
strengthening the resolve of the hearers. In these poems there is the same
attitude encountered by Thomas Jones at the scaffold and by William Lyon,
bishop of Cork and Ross, who lamented that his people called ‘the divine
service appointed by her majesty in the Church of England and Ireland the
devil’s service, and the professors thereof, devils’. Here is a verse from the
late 1570s:64

An chliar-sa anois tig anall
Cliar dhall ar a ndeachaidh ceo,
nı́ mó leo muire ná dog,
dar by God nı́ rachaidh leo

These clergymen who have come from the
Other side – blind clergy enveloped in
Fog, respect a dog more than Mary. And,
By God, they shall not get away with it.

The same poet called on Ireland to resist Captain Luther and Captain
Calvin through adherence to ‘General’ St Patrick and so to avoid becom-
ing an inferior replica of England.65 This is a very nice demonstration
of bardic understanding of reformation impulses in Ireland. Those few
Gaelic clerics who did conform, such as Maol Muire Mac Craith (or
Miler McGrath), archbishop of Cashel from 1571 to 1622, invited particular
spleen:

You empty, befogged churchmen, you shall live in hell;
Whilst Mary’s clergy shall flourish fruitfully, high up in God’s heaven
Maol-without-Mary you are a fool. You journey not towards heaven.
A Maol-without-Mass, a Maol-without-canonical hours is a
Maol destined for hell with its savage pain

An archbishop and his wife, and a suffragan of unclean
Life, who breaks the fast and burns statues, shall have only bitter
Fire for ever and ever

Your woman-folk have ruined the people. Your titles have
Been obtained by sorcery – so it has been whispered abroad,
Obsequious clergy of colossal pretentiousness66

64 Cuthbert Mhág Craith OFM, Dán na mBráthar Mionúr, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1967), Gaelic text of the
poem by Eoghan Ó Dubthaigh, vol. I, pp. 127–50; English translation vol. II, pp. 58–67.

65 Mhágh Craith, Dán, vol. I, p. 152. Aodh MacAingil accused Luther of having the devil as his father
and teacher: Mhágh Craith, Dán, vol. I, p. 178.

66 Mhágh Craith, Dán, vol. II, pp. 58–67.


20 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

Even allowing wives to the notoriously unchaste Gaelic clergy was not
a sufficient draw to conformity, which is not surprising when this kind
of bitter invective was the response. In a sense, too, the ambivalence with
which the early stages of English reformation treated clerical wives probably
lessened any potential appeal to Irish clergy.

The Church of Ireland was, from the very outset, blinded by the English
experience, handcuffed to the claim inherent in its title and hobbled by its
medieval inheritance. Almost everything that ultimately made state reform
in England a success – the language, the old ecclesiastical structures, the law,
the towns, the aristocracy and gentry, the lawyers, the habits of obedience –
had the opposite effect in Ireland. In critical ways pressures caused by the
extension of that reformation to the neighbouring island helped create a
notion of Ireland that had not existed before: that Ireland was a Catholic
kingdom and its inhabitants were Catholics and obedience to Rome was
vital to its existence. That kingdom never did become Protestant. This
book is about one attempt to alter that outcome.


c h a p t e r 2

Raising up the Church of Ireland: John Bramhall
and the beginnings of reconstruction, 1633–1635

the temporal estate of the church of ireland
under james i and charles i

There is little agreement about what actually happened at James VI & I’s
Hampton Court conference of January 1604. One thing is certain: the king
used Ireland as a rallying cry. It was scary, it was irreligious, it made him
but ‘half a king’ and it needed preachers.1 By March of 1610, in the wake of
the previous year’s rebellion, James was telling the English parliament that
a plantation was the only way to solve the great problem.2 As it turned out,
the Ulster plantation was the first great opportunity to radically revive the
fortunes of the Church of Ireland. In these escheated counties the prospect
of sweeping away the pre-reformation jumble and starting afresh presented
itself. Endowing the church handsomely was to prepare it for serving the
expected influx of Protestant settlers who themselves would act as leaven
in the dough of the ‘benighted’ natives.

James had reached these conclusions largely because of a series of reports
compiled by George Montgomery, then bishop of Derry, Clogher and
Raphoe. This Scot, who, tellingly, retained his deanship of Norwich for
most of his episcopate, saw Ulster as the chance to start afresh.3 He envis-
aged a church firmly founded on a generous allotment of lands to a vigorous
British episcopate whose prosperity would be assured by excision of all unas-
similable Gaelic customs and structures.4 In almost every respect the king
followed his recommendations and, into the bargain, made Montgomery

1 William Barlow, Summe and substance of the conference . . . att Hampton Court (1638 edn), p. 98.
2 J. P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: political writings (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 196–7.
3 Henry A. Jefferies, ‘George Montgomery, first Protestant bishop of Derry’ in Henry A. Jefferies and

Ciarán Devlin (eds.), History of the diocese of Derry from earliest times (Dublin, 2000), pp. 140–66.
4 The vast number of parishes and livings in each diocese represented a great problem for the Church of

Ireland. Sporadic efforts were made to unite parishes and to do as Montgomery proposed. However,
the most common solution was pluralism. For his proposals, see Shirley, pp. 25–38. See also Ford,
Protestant, pp. 127–54 and Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 167–
205. Montgomery saw to it that the older parochial structure of rector, vicar and erenagh was collapsed

21


22 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

a plantation commissioner. Since his arrival in Ulster in 1606 he had been
busy suing for recovery of temporalities and he put his knowledge of the
terrain to excellent use. The church was allocated 74,852 acres or 16 per cent
of all of the escheated land. Its handmaidens in the work of civility also did
well – 2,645 acres for the county freeschools and 12,400 acres for Trinity
College.5

But the Ulster plantation turned out to be no simple transfer of land –
and the church suffered badly as a result of its defects. The confusion
over place names and the inaccuracy of surveys left many of the glebe
lands, generous as they were on paper, distant from the churches and on
poorer upland soils.6 The church had also been stripped of its cathedral
land, much of which had been passed in patents as monastery land.7 Lords
deputy Chichester and St John bore the brunt of the king’s annoyance
and frequent outrage at the progress of the entire enterprise. As far as the
church was concerned, his logic was simple. As engines of reformation,
the bishops had been given much, and much was expected of them. News
that these prelates were leasing without apparent regard to their successors
and without apparent regard to their mission was greeted by him as the
most egregious kind of disobedience. It was, of course, easy to chastise the
episcopate as a way of letting off steam about the plantation as a whole, but
their manifest failure to lead was a blemish on the king’s own self-image
as the Constantine of the British Isles.8 The horde of Protestant settlers
never materialised. Those planters who remained were forced to deal with
the ‘natives’ and seek derogations from the original conditions in order to
retain Gaelic Irish as farmers, small tenants and labourers. Planter interest
became focused on survival, then on profit, and religious reformation was,
at best, an aspiration.9

into a single incumbent. This, in turn, meant that the older families were swept away by newcomers
so that by 1622 there was almost a complete change of personnel. See Henry Jefferies, ‘Bishop George
Montgomery’s survey of the parishes of Derry diocese: a complete text from c. 1609’, Seanchas Ard
Mhacha 17 (1996–7), 44–76.

5 Philip Robinson, The plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish Landscape 1600–1670 (Belfast,
repr. 1994), pp. 69–71, 82–4, 195, 211. See also Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, p. 205.

6 Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, p. 296. The 1622 visitation, TCD MS 550, gives many examples of inconvenient
glebe lands.

7 James I to Oliver St John, 24 September 1616, Cal. SP Ire. 1615–25, p. 138.
8 For a typical outpouring, see James I to Chichester, 29 April 1612, Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, p. 264. The

bishops had no resources with which to develop their vast lands and, as the plantation progressed,
middling undertakers either sold out or left, leaving a number of larger planters who sought to
maximise the size of their holdings in order to wrest what profit they could out of the lands. Given
this, it is understandable that many of them had no alternative but to let their lands go for derisory
rents. For a useful discussion of these and associated problems, see Canny, Making Ireland, pp. 205–42.

9 The literature on the Ulster plantation is vast; for a convenient introduction see Aidan Clarke,
‘Pacification, plantation and the Catholic question, 1603–23’ in NHI III, 187–231.


Raising up the Church of Ireland 23

Despite all its shortcomings, Montgomery’s plantation scheme had a per-
sistent appeal for churchmen. Its seductive simplicity concealed a profound
evangelical flaw in that he had only conceived of full Protestantisation when
the entire structure of an existing church and society was overturned.10 For
the rest of his reign, James showed marked favour to the church but made
no further move towards systematic overhaul and simply tried to improve
the material condition of the church by orders, commissions and investi-
gations. In 1611, following a report from Andrew Knox which restated the
link between the plantation scheme and promotion of Protestantism, he
issued orders enjoining residence upon bishops, annual diocesan visitations,
re-edification of churches and the appointment of able ministers.11 Later
still, he tried to fix some of the smaller problems by ordering that parish
bounds be established, and glebes clearly named and assigned to more con-
venient places.12 Another batch of remedies was proposed in a list of Acts
intended for the parliament of 1613–15.13 All cathedral churches would be
repaired or rebuilt. The possibility of unification for some bishoprics was
to be investigated. An Act which anticipated two of those passed in the 1634
parliament was also featured – a limitation on leases made by churchmen
in accordance with Elizabeth’s English statutes, and a proviso for Ulster
plantation bishops to make longer leases.14 The parliament collapsed but
it is likely that the records were dug out a decade later under Wentworth.15

In the meantime the sole safeguard against destructive leasing remained a
proclamation of 21 October 1609 which was more honoured in the breach
than the observance.16

The regal visitation of 1615 aimed to ascertain the numbers of clergy,
their competency and the condition of their churches. While it aimed to

10 Ford, Protestant, chs. 4 and 6; Cal. SP Ire. 1615–25, pp. 235, 275 ff. Ussher hoped that tithes in any
projected Connacht plantation would be settled as they had been in Ulster: Ussher to Laud, 22
September 1613, SP 63/252/2025; Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, pp. 630–1.

11 James I to Chichester, 26 April 1611, Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, pp. 31–2. Knox’s activities are discussed in
Ford, Protestant, pp. 140–7.

12 James I to Oliver St John, 24 September 1616, Cal. SP Ire. 1615–25, p. 138.
13 J. S. Brewer and William Bullen (eds.), Calendar of the Carew manuscripts preserved in the archiepiscopal

library at Lambeth, 1515–1624, 6 vols. (1867–73), vol. VI, pp. 154–7.
14 See below, pp. 46–53, for the church statutes in the 1634 parliament.
15 Victor Treadwell, ‘The House of Lords in the Irish Parliament of 1613–1615’, English Histori-

cal Review 80 (1965), 92–107; John McCavitt, ‘An unspeakable parliamentary fracas: the Irish
House of Commons, 1613’, Analecta Hibernica 37 (1995–6), 223–35. A number of bills con-
cerning church temporalities were introduced, Commons’ jn. Ire., pp. 14–17, 24–6, 33, 41–2,
49–50.

16 This proclamation was reissued on 17 March 1617, Str P 20/141; 17 March 1621, TCD MS 580,
fols. 27r–28r. Wentworth to Laud, 29 January 1634, Str P 6, p. 13, suggests using it to commence
prosecution of the earl of Cork in Youghal.


24 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

provide the information necessary to implement change and improvement
it was, without the intended legislation, a dead letter.17

Due to the manifest failure of the planters to comply with the conditions
imposed on them, the paralysis of government in Ireland, and continuing
financial woes of the kingdom, not to mention the apparent missionary
failure of the church, a commission of inquiry into the state of Ireland
was launched in 1622. For the church this meant a much more searching
regal visitation.18 Now impropriations came under serious scrutiny and
the commissioners were empowered to remind impropriators to ensure
that vicars received their due proportion (one-third) of the income of the
living.

Unsurprisingly, the report of the commissioners highlighted the poverty
of the clergy and the failure of impropriators to pay the vicars a decent
stipend; once again it condemned the allotment of glebes in the plantation
areas. It recommended challenging the titles of some of the impropriators
and the extension of English laws on leasing to Ireland.19 The outcome of
the commission was the issue of ‘Orders and Directions concerning the state
of the Church of Ireland’ of 1623.20 Incumbents on the plantation lands
were restricted to 21-year leases and of no more than 60 acres at a time. No
patents of impropriation would be renewed or confirmed without a bond
agreeing a competent salary for the curate. There were detailed instructions
on the re-edification of churches and cathedrals, lands given for charitable
uses and the vexed question of ‘customary’ tithes. Clergy were enjoined to
use the Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament in Irish where
appropriate and there was to be stricter supervision of those presented as
masters in the freeschools.

These ‘Orders and Directions’ are noteworthy for two reasons. The first
is that there is no evidence that they were much complied with. The second
is that when taken with the legislative proposals they encompass most of the
programme Wentworth and Bramhall were to embark upon just a decade
later. The crucial difference lay in the tactics used. James made scores of
orders for individual bishops: making grants, commanding special hearings,
permitting some bishops longer leases, instigating special commissions for

17 P. B. Phair, ‘Visitations of the seventeenth century’, Analecta Hibernica 28 (1978), 79–102; M. V.
Ronan, ‘The royal visitation of Dublin, 1615’, Archivium Hibernicum 8 (1941), 1–55.

18 There are two recent accounts of the work of the commission, Victor Treadwell, Buckingham
and Ireland, 1616–28 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 186–248 and Canny, Making Ireland, pp. 243–58. Victor
Treadwell, ‘The survey of Armagh and Tyrone, 1622’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology 23 (1960), 126–37,
has some remarks on the 1622 commission as a whole; TCD MS 806, fol. 119r ff., ‘Remembrances
to the Commissioners 1615 [recte 1622]’.

19 TCD MS 808, fols. 41r–45r. 20 BL Add. MS 4756, Marsh MS Z3.1.3 (30–8).


Raising up the Church of Ireland 25

their lands and so on.21 While such actions were helpful for some bishops in
the short term, they had no lasting impact. The overall numbers and quality
of the clergy went on growing in the first two decades of the century and
the strain on a church rich in resources but much poorer in revenue grew
and grew.22 The result was more pluralism, more disadvantageous leasing
and more unwise alienation. Unstinting as James had been in his plantation
settlement, a bare three weeks before his death the bishops whose dioceses
fell within the escheated counties petitioned him to complain that their
clergy had been deprived of the greater part of their maintenance.23

Anxiety about the state of the church was not just the preserve of the
bishops and of the government. Lay commentators emphasised the con-
nection between money and ministry. Richard Hadsor’s 1623 tract, Adver-
tisements for Ireland, is a useful Old English counterpart to the reports of
the 1622 commissioners and a record of the kind of impact the Church of
Ireland’s established status could make.24 He complained of the excessive
fines exacted by the Protestant clergy for marriages, burials and churchings
(known as clandestines) performed by papist priests: ‘this they perform
very punctually and all this goes to their own private purse and nothing
to the king’s’. He condemned commissary officials who paid great rents
to bishops for their positions and then vexed the country ‘with their too
frequent courts’.25 From the erosion of endowments proceeded abuse of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in order to make up missing income. Discredit
followed on dilapidation. Hadsor suggested that the reason why so many
of the estates of the clergy had been ‘dismembered’ was because in the dis-
turbances of the past decades ‘most of their records, charters and evidences
were . . . embezzled and lost’.26 Overcoming this dearth of reliable infor-
mation would later account for a chief part of Bramhall’s early activities
in Ireland. Overall, the tract shows that the church was most vulnerable
to the shifting patterns of landholding in Ireland. Others might gain great
estates, but the church was a consistent loser. As it became poorer, then its
own clergy began to devour what was left themselves.

The ‘Graces’ of 1627 echoed many of the concerns of the Advertise-
ments.27 The excessive fees of the ecclesiastical courts and the fines levied on

21 Inter alia: Cal. SP Ire. 1611–14, pp. 106, 130, 181, 248, 311, 315, 346, 478. 22 Ford, Protestant, ch. 4.
23 SP63/240/30; Cal. SP Ire. 1615–25, p. 568. Ussher to Laud, 2 August 1631, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 13.
24 The authorship of the tract has been attributed to Hadsor by Victor Treadwell, ‘Richard Hadsor

and the authorship of “Advertisements for Ireland”’, IHS 30 (1997), 305–53. For a modern edi-
tion see George O’Brien (ed.), Advertisements for Ireland, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland,
unnumbered volume (Dublin, 1923).

25 O’Brien (ed.), Advertisements, pp. 16, 54. 26 O’Brien (ed.), Advertisements, p. 53.
27 A list of the ‘Graces’ will be found in Clarke, Old English, pp. 242–54.


26 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

‘clandestine’ marriages, burials and christenings were still a matter for con-
cern. The encroachments of undertakers on Ulster glebe lands were adverted
to once again. Redress was also sought for ‘the bestowing of plurality of
benefices upon unqualified persons, who are unable or unworthy minis-
ters’.28 The mixture of complaints in the ‘Graces’ shows that both Protestant
and Catholic laity were dissatisfied with, respectively, the condition of the
established church and the behaviour of its clergy.

In 1620, Thomas Ryves, former judge of faculties in the prerogative
court of Ireland, had published The poor vicar’s plea.29 This was an attempt
to redress the ‘miserable plight our poor Church of Ireland stands [in]
at present’.30 There were historical reasons for this indigence – there had
been more monasteries in Ireland so the creation of large numbers of lay
impropriators was even more catastrophic than it had been in England.
The bulk of the pamphlet is taken up with a closely argued disquisition
on the rights of bishops to sue impropriators for a decent maintenance
for the incumbent clerks. However, the main interest of the pamphlet
lies not in this exhibition of legal knowledge but in the fact that Ryves
specifically eschewed the use of royal prerogative as a remedy since suf-
ficient legal mechanisms were in existence.31 The Plea ends on a bleak
note:

If this course be legal, and may be taken for the better maintenance of the poor
clergy in this miserable kingdom, well and good. If not, God grant some other
may; for if none be, farewell religion: and what can then ensue but the abomination
of desolation in the highest places of this kingdom? Which God forbid.32

Here Ryves put his finger on a substantive point – legal strategies or even
prerogative strategies were nothing without consistent application. There
was no dearth of plans for Ireland; there was, instead, a dearth of successful
application of them.

Shortly after becoming bishop of London, William Laud began to cor-
respond with Ussher about Irish church matters. As he did elsewhere,
Laud adopted the voice of king’s representative in his dealings with Ussher.

28 Clarke, Old English, p. 249. They also showed how patentees of dissolved monasteries and priories
had claimed the monastic liberties from military cesses and other public charges yet, despite their
increased profits, had withheld competent maintenance from vicars and curates. This was also a
dodge of impropriators in England.

29 Ryves had been judge of faculties in the prerogative court of Armagh. He resigned after a dispute
with Archbishop Hampton of Armagh and Bishop Montgomery of Meath. Returning to London,
he published The poor vicar’s plea. According to Heylyn, Ryves informed Laud of the deplorable
state of the Church of Ireland; see Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), p. 268. ‘Ryves, Sir Thomas (d.1652)’,
ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24434, accessed 13 December 2005.

30 Poor vicar’s plea, sig. A3. 31 Poor vicar’s plea, sig. A4. 32 Poor vicar’s plea, p. 152.


Raising up the Church of Ireland 27

The earlier letters are concerned with men rather than measures but very
rapidly Ussher began to make suggestions for further reform, suggesting,
for instance, that the king issue letters on the scandal of drunken ministers
but very rapidly working up to episcopal revenues and ecclesiastical juris-
diction.33 Laud’s first concern was to garner accurate information on the
state of the church.34 He also began to propose modest guidelines for the
Church of Ireland which were distinct from previous schemes. He suggested
that deaneries should not be held as commendams and that young men
(under forty) should not be candidates for bishoprics.35 These restrictions
were eminently applicable to the Church of Ireland, but they clearly sprang
from Laud’s own beliefs about the dignity of the church and clergy. Such a
ban on deaneries in commendam is very striking given that the practice was
still current in the far wealthier Church of England.36 The hybrid produced
by the joining of Laud’s wider goals for the established churches of these
islands and the remedies devised in Ireland for the Irish church itself was,
as we shall see, highly important through the 1630s.

Ussher, for his part, was happy to cooperate with a patron who had
influence at the highest levels in England. He relished the effect Laud’s
name had at the privy council in Ireland: ‘you strike such a terror into the
hearts of those who wish to despoil the church, that if I merely mention
your name at the Council table it is like the Gorgon’s head to some of
them’.37 Laud’s interest in Ireland became known beyond castle circles,
though, because in early 1633 he was petitioned by a Kilmore clergyman
about a tithe dispute.

The chief project on which the two men laboured over these years was
a scheme to have the royal impropriations restored to the church. To this
end, they compiled valuations of the affected benefices and mulled over the
best course to take. To add weight to their case, Ussher drew up a ‘horror
report’ of the condition of the church in Co. Louth. They fought off
attempts to cripple the scheme by interested parties in Ireland and England

33 Laud to Ussher, 29 January 1629, WL 6, p. 258; Ussher to Laud, 6 May 1629, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 8;
Ussher to Laud, 11 September 1629, SP 63/249/1485, Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, pp. 481–3. For a general
discussion of Laud’s interest in the Irish church, see J. S. Morrill, ‘A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical
imperialism under the early Stuarts’ in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds.), Religion, culture and society
in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 226–31.

34 He requested a list from Ussher of ‘the names and values of all the bishoprics and deaneries in
Ireland, and what bishoprics are joined to others, that I may be better able to serve that church’.
Laud to Ussher, 16 June 1632, WL 6, p. 262. The list is in Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, pp. 481–3.

35 For the age bar on appointments, see also chapter 4, p. 117 below.
36 For example, Laud’s rival, John Williams, had managed to hold on to Westminster in 1621 when

elevated to Lincoln.
37 Ussher to Laud, 11 July 1631, SP 63/252/1991, Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, p. 622.


28 John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland

and secured the requisite letters from Charles.38 Despite all this effort, the
Irish council saw to it that the scheme was sunk through a combination of
legal reservations and a proposition made for improvement of royal rents.39

This outcome spoke volumes about a church whose control of its own
holdings and, indeed, its autonomy had been subverted by the influence
of powerful interests who continued to profit from those weaknesses.

This experience of cooperation and failure with Ussher taught Laud two
lessons. The first was a recognition of the critical importance of the method
by which solutions (of which there was no shortage) were applied to the
Church of Ireland. In the midst of the impropriations campaign Ussher had
become distracted by an argument similar to Thomas Ryves’s for getting
existing impropriators to meet their legal obligations.40 This lack of single-
minded commitment to a more comprehensive change convinced Laud
that the primate was not the kind of ally he sought. The second lesson was
that the ability of the Irish council to sink the scheme showed nothing could
be done for the church until the influence of figures such as lord justice the
earl of Cork, who had extracted most from its endowment, was curbed.

Any plans for the effective reconstruction of the Church of Ireland had to
be carried out by independent agents in Ireland who enjoyed strong English
support. Laud could provide that support. In Thomas Wentworth there was
a viceroy who was committed to restoring the patrimony of the church and
who was strong enough to subdue the ruling élite in Ireland. Wentworth
would quickly ascertain which of the many schemes for the restoration of
the church could be effective. In Wentworth’s chaplain, John Bramhall,
there was someone prepared to undertake the enormous labour of turning
all these advantages into real gains for the church and clergy of Ireland.

john bramhall: agent of reconstruction

While Laud and Wentworth are chiefly remembered for their actions in
the 1630s, John Bramhall’s posthumous fame rests mainly on his exchanges

38 Laud to Ussher, 23 February 1630, WL 6, p. 270 and 5 July 1630, WL 6, p. 272. Ussher to Laud, 5 April
1630, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 10; 17 April 1630, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p 11; 2 May 1630, Bodl. Sancroft 18,
p. 13; 23 December 1631, SP 63/252/2054, Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, p. 638; 24 March 1632, SP 63/253/2100,
Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, p. 653; 19 November 1632, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 14. Ussher to the lords justices,
3 April 1630, SP 63/250/1638, Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, p. 527. List of churches in Co. Louth, 5 April 1630,
SP 63/250/1642, Cal. SP Ire. 1625–32, p. 529.

39 Ussher to Laud, 25 August 1630, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 12. Report on petition of the clergy of Ireland
for the restoration of royal impropriations, 1635, Str P 6, p. 158.

40 This was presented to Ussher by William Noy. In great excitement, the primate wrote to Laud that
this was ‘a matter of as great (if not greater) moment for the repairing of the wastes of this poor
church as that we have in hand’, Ussher to Laud, 2 August 1631, Bodl. Sancroft 18, p. 13.


Raising up the Church of Ireland 29

with Thomas Hobbes during the 1650s. Bramhall’s reputation as an
Anglican ‘father’ of the via media was first established by Jeremy Taylor
in his funeral sermon on 16 July 1663, elaborated by John Vesey in his
Athanasius Hibernicus (1676), canonised in the nineteenth-century Library
of Anglo-Catholic theology and later elegised by T. S. Eliot.41 His early life
and Irish career up to 1641 have, comparatively speaking, remained obscure.
John Bramhall was born in Pontefract and baptised in St Giles’s church on
18 November 1594.42 He was the first of six children of Peter Bramhall,
who died in 1635.43 Bramhall was admitted to Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, on 21 February 1609, took his BA in 1612, MA in 1616 and
BD in 1623. His tutor there was Richard Howlett, whom he later preferred
in Ireland, and the Master was Samuel Ward.44 Bramhall later praised Ward,
with whom he occasionally corresponded about college finances, for rec-
ommending the study of patristics and scholastic theology as key guides in
resolving controversies.45

Archbishop Toby Matthew ordained him deacon in York minster on
24 December 1615 and priest on 22 December 1616. His first pastoral
appointment was as assistant curate at St Martin’s Micklegate in York,
where he succeeded as rector in August 1617.46 On 24 June 1618 he was
presented to the rectory of South Kilvington, near Thirsk, by Christopher
Wandesforde, and on 10 November he married Eleanor Collingwood (née
Halley), the widow of his predecessor. It was probably the patronage of
Wandesforde which brought Bramhall to