The reign of Henry VIII saw Ireland subjected to heightened bouts of government ‘reform’ and intervention as the English crown sought to impose its rule and reduce the island to obedience and ‘civility’. From 1534–6, a major element of this armoury of ‘reform’ was the anti-papal legislation of the Reformation, most notably the royal supremacy by which the king claimed jurisdiction over the church. Historians have demonstrated that although resistance to the break with Rome was relatively muted and that devotional change among the island’s inhabitants was almost non-existent until later in the century, Dublin Castle, at the behest of Thomas Cromwell acting as the king’s vicegerent in ecclesiastical causes, achieved important progress enforcing the new legislation throughout the Pale and colony.Footnote 1 A problem, however, persists in the historiography. Many agree that the king’s settlement had a ‘strong doctrinal dimension’, that it was not simply ‘a political Reformation’ and that the Henrician programme in part aimed at morally ‘reforming’ the island’s inhabitants.Footnote 2 But ecclesiastical policy and the lack of popular support have retained near exclusive attention to the detriment of a fuller understanding of how spiritual and moral ideas and concerns galvanised Irish politics in a Reformation key. If this has obscured some of the major fault lines of Christian order and power in sixteenth-century Europe and the regional forms they took, it has also undercut our appreciation of the early Reformation’s decisive role in polarising political life in Ireland.
This article rethinks from a broad Tudor and European perspective the early Reformation in Ireland by reframing our understanding of Henrician politics in terms of Christian moral order. To do so, it focuses on treason and dissimulation, two still neglected pillars of Henrician order, power and rhetoric that helped redefine what it meant to be a ‘true subject’ of the crown. Historians have long recognised that events in the 1530s strained the demands of obedience to the king in ways that spurred English ambitions to ‘reform’ Ireland.Footnote 3 Less appreciated, however, is the degree to which treason and dissimulation enable us to better locate English-Irish political life within a broader orbit of archipelagic and continental currents that were indelibly moral in character, acquiring new implications in the Reformation, and decidedly a matter of Christian sovereignty. The article shows that, although long viewed in Ireland (like elsewhere) as transgressions of divine and civil order, and therefore as emblems of a morally disordered Christian life, treason and dissimulation acquired new valences after the Reformation and Kildare Rebellion. This article argues that, by modifying the terms by which ‘true subjects’ were distinguished from dissident persons and conducts of all kinds, treason and dissimulation became revitalised signs of moral perfidy and a stubborn attachment to Rome. They should thus be viewed as newly volatile loci of embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties in the early Reformation. Key to such developments, the article suggests, was a man who came to paradoxically embody both Tudor order and its subversion: Lord Deputy Leonard Grey.
Grey’s activities in Ireland are well known. A military man sent to quell Lord Offaly, Thomas FitzGerald’s rebellion, he was appointed marshal of the king’s army in 1535 and lord deputy of Ireland a year later. As governor, he tirelessly roamed the country, receiving the submissions of numerous Irish lords and captains while leading what were often brutal military campaigns to extend royal authority. Offaly’s father, Gerald FitzGerald, ninth earl of Kildare, however, had married Grey’s sister, Elizabeth. To the chagrin of the powerful Butlers of Ormond, the Geraldines’ main aristocratic rivals, this made the lord deputy both the late earl’s brother-in-law and uncle to the now abolished earldom’s heir, the child Gerald FitzGerald, the future eleventh earl of Kildare. When Offaly and his five uncles were executed as traitors in 1537, Grey effectively became the quasi-leader of the now leaderless Geraldines, occupying the same position the eighth and ninth earls of Kildare had from the 1490s onward when they virtually monopolised the office of lord deputy. Meanwhile, the ‘young Gerald’, as Gerald (the heir) was known, became a focal point of opposition to crown policy in Ireland through Irish and English-Irish intrigue with the Scots, Habsburgs, French and Rome. This made Grey an easy target of the Butlers and their allies in Dublin and London, although Cromwell’s continued support while at the height of his power kept his enemies at bay. A year after Cromwell’s fall in 1540, however, Grey succumbed to the factional rivalries that plagued Irish political life, and he found the same ignominious end as his benefactor: a traitor’s death at the scaffold.
Grey’s historical significance is usually understood in three ways: in terms of his sidelining of local power brokers and the new importance the office of lord deputy acquired as a centre of gravity around which a ‘king’s party’ was forged; in terms of the Butler-Kildare feud he was embroiled in and which divided crown government; and in terms of his unprecedented military forays into Gaelic Ireland.Footnote 4 Though these have enriched our understanding of Grey’s role in the development of Henrician ‘reform’, less studied, however, are the contemporary portraits of the governor as the morally disordered enemy of all. Such portraits not only help us better grasp Grey’s relationship to the Reformation, one often viewed in light of the tepidness with which he enforced the king’s ecclesiastical policies and which helped foment his critics’ accusations that he staunchly supported Rome.Footnote 5 Instead, by providing a fuller picture of the fault lines of Christian power, they also showcase how the moral and theological aspects of (dis)order, which he for different men embodied, offer a rich vantage point from which to reframe, thematically and transregionally, the early Reformation, and with it, Henrician politics in Ireland. What, then, did this look like?
For years, Grey’s rivals tried to defame him as a duplicitous tyrant and bedfellow of those other abominable dissemblers and traitors: the friars and the Geraldines, the new bane of Henrician order in Ireland. Writing to Cromwell in March 1540, the lord deputy sought to reassure him that the allegations of misconduct against him were misguided: ‘And dout not, my Lorde, what soo ever sinistre report hath byn made unto you of me, but I shall fulfill thoffice and dutie of an honest man, or els for my sake never trust creatur; and hitherto I am right well assurid, that he is nat lyvyng, that can spott my cote with any maner of unfayednes or dissimulacion towardes you, but my worde, wryting, and dede hath byn corespondent to the sinceritie of my pore harte.’Footnote 6 Others thought otherwise. Later in May, the archbishop of Dublin, George Browne, reported to Cromwell that the country had never been in such disorder, whatever Grey claimed. In fact, the latter’s letters, Browne opined, probably ‘conteyned nothing elles but cloked dissimulacions onely, and the very olde practise of the Geraldines’.Footnote 7
The charge is significant. ‘Geraldine’ had by then become something close to a catch-all designation for ‘papistical traitors’, the worst of whom were the friars. Indeed, historians have long noted the friars’ role in obstructing the Reformation, while the Geraldines as political and cultural pillars of the late-medieval lordship have similarly been extensively studied.Footnote 8 Neither, however, have been appraised as Reformation emblems of moral (dis)order between embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties. To study them as such is to investigate how and with what consequences the above confluence of Geraldine, Grey, dissimulation and traitor took shape. If this helps locate Ireland within early modern intersections of Christian morality and sovereignty more generally, it also highlights how the Reformation, inflected by the Kildare revolt, helped polarise the moral contours of political life in Ireland.
This article charts how Grey’s person, family and office brought together a series of moral representations and political-theological sites of conflict that threw the Christian poles of order — ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ — into polarised relief. Put otherwise, the lord deputy’s unique position as the late earl of Kildare’s brother-in-law and surrogate allowed a discourse of treason and dissimulation to crystallise in the factional opposition to his rule and into a distinctly early Reformation polemic that reflected the shifting sands of Christian sovereignty in Ireland. As we shall see, the planes of royal and papal, and English and Irish, contestation that made this possible were many, and they brought together secular and ecclesiastical law and policy and devotional and political life. With Geraldine and other intrigue with Rome, the Scots and continental princes heightening fears of invasion and unrest, the scope of treason greatly expanded. Meanwhile, the problem of dissimulation acquired a renewed urgency as official anxieties over the feigned loyalty of the island’s inhabitants intensified. If such alarm came to intersect with the regime’s efforts to stamp out ‘idolatry’, it also reflected the period’s shifting boundaries between holiness and iniquity: the tenor of Henrician political discourse changed as crown officials began lambasting the traitors, dissemblers, idolaters and devils in their midst, reserving their greatest vitriol for the friars and Geraldines, whom Grey was accused of supporting. Ultimately, the period’s thicket of struggles engendered paradoxical representations of Grey as the iconoclast crown representative, the heretical defamer of holiness, and the leader and abettor of dissemblers and traitors. Out of these conflicting portraits of the lord deputy, there coalesced the newly polarised terms of Henrician order in Ireland: cast as the enemy of the king’s ‘true subjects’, Grey died a traitor’s death as the purported leader of the ‘Geraldine and papistical traitorous sect’.
We may say, in short, that treason and dissimulation provide a valuable prism through which to assess major events, developments and actors of Henry VIII’s reign, one that focuses our attention on the intimate links between law, theology and morality as key indices of the often subtle, though key, ways politics in Ireland, and particularly the Pale, evolved in the early Reformation. Certainly, concerns over transgressions of divine and civil law, or what it meant to be a ‘true’ subject, far predated the break with Rome, and they should not always be seen as explicitly gesturing at the legal, moral and theological ramifications of the Reformation. Men accused others of moral impropriety for all sorts of reasons, including personal and factional animosity. But as we shall see, the stakes such transgressions acquired as problems of moral order reveal much about how the Reformation directly and indirectly shaped Henrician politics — and in ways that bore distinctly pre-confessional affinities with the more extensively studied Reformations and political dislocation of the reign of Elizabeth I.
I
On 1 May 1536, the first session of the Irish reformation parliament began its proceedings. Bringing together the lordship’s spiritual and secular elites, the assembly was charged with passing a variant of the settlement adopted in England two years prior. Six acts were quickly ratified, sanctioning a complete civil overhaul of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Most importantly, ‘Thacte of supreme hedd’ confirmed Henry VIII and his heirs as the supreme head on earth of the Church of Ireland and, from the crown’s perspective, overcame a church divided between English and Irish territories with the all-Ireland Hibernica ecclesia.Footnote 9 Enacted ‘to represse and extyrpe all errours heresies and other ernomyties a[nd] abuses’ and ‘to the pleasure of almyghtie God for thencrease of vertue in Cristes religion’, the act affirmed royal power as the custodian of the spiritual needs and ends of all subjects.Footnote 10 Not everyone, however, agreed.
The years after 1534 were troubled ones across Henry VIII’s dominions. Offaly’s revolt — which had delayed the passing of the Reformation legislation in Ireland — was crushed by the spring of 1535, but its fallout was far from resolved. Serious challenges soon emerged in England itself, with the popular rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace and the aristocratic plot, the Exeter Conspiracy, once again threatening Henry VIII’s rule and Reformation.Footnote 11 As the latter deepened England’s diplomatic isolation in Europe, obedience became the necessary safeguard to protect against the foreign invasions and papally-abetted domestic unrest that threatened Tudor rule.Footnote 12 Indeed, the Reformation imparted new, much heavier demands to obedience itself: by equivocating between obedience owed to God with that owed to the king, the royal supremacy effectively redefined civil obedience as a matter of salvation.Footnote 13
That the king was now recognised as a caretaker of souls, however, had deep roots in English and European traditions of monarchy, particularly as these remodulated the boundaries between secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Such fluidity had over the centuries shaped how transgressions against divine and human law were grasped, and in some cases, conflated.Footnote 14 The fifteenth-century transformation of heresy into treason against God and a violation against English common law is a case in point.Footnote 15 By Henry VIII’s reign, the parameters again shifted, with different perspectives marking early Reformation polemics. Typical was Thomas More’s reference in A supplication of souls (1529) to the fifteenth-century ‘traitorous heresies’ that for him presaged present-day evangelicals and which he condemned as a ‘heinous treason to God and the world’. By contrast, in his The obedience of a Christian man (1528), William Tyndale castigated the ‘secret conspiration’ of Rome’s adherents, whom he called traitors ‘to all creatures’, while the Henrician formulary of faith, The bishop’s book (1537), lambasted ‘secret pacts of covenants with the devil’ as ‘so high offence and treason to God’.Footnote 16 On either side of the Irish Sea, charges of heresy by committed royal apologists against Rome’s adherents were few and far between, though in both, treason’s newly expanded scope was clear.Footnote 17
As the struggle against Rome deepened, Henry VIII grew dissatisfied with legal procedures that depended on judges whom he could not trust to agree with his definition of treason. A series of acts and drafts which culminated in the Act of Treason (1534) introduced new treasonable offences to better equip the king. Footnote 18 This legislation was harsh, and contemporaries recognised it as such, though its severity echoed a clause of the Edwardian Act of 1352: with mere words construed as harming the person of the king, ‘imagining and compassing the king’s death’ had in the mid-fourteenth century become a treasonable offence. The Henrician Act similarly made spoken or written words expressing a desire to cause the king bodily harm, or labelling him a heretic, schismatic, infidel, tyrant or a usurper, high treason.Footnote 19 Both Acts of Succession between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (25 Hen. VIII, c. 22 (1534)) and Jane Seymour (28 Hen. VIII, c. 7 (1537)) also stipulated that slandering the king, the queen, his title and his heirs with any act by print, writing or deed was high treason. Indeed, it was likely on account of Offaly’s ongoing rebellion as well that the medieval clause on the levying war against the king reiterated in a 1531 draft was retained in the 1534 act.Footnote 20
A similar expansion of treason occurred in Ireland, although the ground was well prepared for such a development: months before Offaly’s rebellion, some had begun charging the great English-Irish earls of Kildare, Ormond and Desmond with treason, blaming them for the lands’ wars and disorder.Footnote 21 Then, in 1536, charges of treason against Kildare were retroactively expanded as a parliamentary act attainted the earl for high treason from 8 July 1528. Footnote 22 The strategy was to link Kildare to his cousin, James FitzGerald, the eleventh earl of Desmond, who had sought aid from King Francis I and Emperor Charles V in the 1520s to dispossess the Tudors from their right to Ireland, and to cast him as the traitorous architect of his son’s recent rebellion.Footnote 23 The parliament then passed the two Acts of Succession (1536–7) and the Act of Slander (1537), a variant of the English Act of Treason. Another statute, the ‘Act for marrying with Irishmen’ (1537), deepened longstanding efforts at proscribing all affiliations with the king’s Irish enemies by deeming not only the violation of mixed marriages by the Irish person thus made denizen to be treason, but also any who associated with such transgressors of matrimonial law to be traitors themselves.Footnote 24
II
After 1534, the scope of treason was expanding, with crown service in all its ideal moral attributes strained by the heavier obligations of obedience. As the marriage act just cited indicates, this raised particular challenges in the land of Gael and Gall, where English-Irish interactions and the exigencies of English government and defence were inextricably entwined with the vagaries of colonial warfare and aristocratic strife. Most important here was how the Reformation and Kildare revolt further muddled the already unstable distinction between (English) ‘subjects’ and (Irish) ‘enemies’. As the rest of this article will demonstrate, polemical portraits of Grey, the Geraldines and the friars left a distinct imprint on this development.
Certainly, a well-established colonial vocabulary had long clearly distinguished English and Irish. The English referred to Gaelic noble lineages as the king’s ‘Irish enemies’; being ‘enemies’ signalled their exclusion from the commonwealth. There were also those of ‘Irish blood’ living amongst the Englishry who were unaffiliated with any Gaelic dynasty. The two were distinguished in English law, but neither were recognised as subjects unless they had acquired charters of English liberty.Footnote 25 The crown, however, still claimed authority over the Irish, often with reference to the twelfth-century conquest.Footnote 26 By the 1530s, moreover, the rhetoric of ‘reform’ was changing: after decades of applying only to the English, the ‘reformation’ of the land now also targeted the Irish.Footnote 27 Indeed, the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘enemy’ had long been precarious,Footnote 28 but crisis in the 1530s further shifted this already unstable discourse of difference in ways that facilitated a slip from ‘enemy’ to ‘traitor’: Lord Conn O’Neill of Tyrone, an Irish noble whose lordship had long had a complex relationship to crown authority, was one of the first Irish lords to be denounced as a traitor in 1535.Footnote 29
By then, Dublin Castle and Whitehall sought to identify all of Offaly’s supporters and foreign connections.Footnote 30 Cromwell was bent on discovering the scope of opposition to the king’s legislation, even intending to ask Offaly himself who within Ireland had called Henry VIII a heretic.Footnote 31 At least one proposal from January 1536 recommended establishing a special parliamentary inquisition to enquire into all who had supported the rebels.Footnote 32 The following year, some tried to remove from office Geoffrey Fyche, the dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and Thomas Hassard, the prior of Christ Church, who were seen to ‘have lent an unacceptably sympathetic ear to the treasonous promptings’ of former lord chancellor, John Travers, a man executed in 1535 and known for having written a tract against the royal supremacy.Footnote 33 Although some (like Grey) sought to relieve the fear most inhabitants of the Pale lived in for their prior support of the rebellion — a general pardon was in fact announced in July 1538 — men of the Kildare household were still interrogated on suspected treason as late as August 1537.Footnote 34
This included Grey. Those for whom the lord deputy’s Geraldine connections compromised his standing as governor rejected his approach to ‘reforming’ and conquering Ireland: his detractors were quick to point out any association he kept with declared traitors and argued that his disorderly ways both sullied the dignity of the crown and deterred English and Irish alike from serving the king. Cromwell’s client Thomas Agard informed the master secretary in March 1536 that Grey had brought into his service the brother of Parson Walsh (who had gone to Spain as Offaly’s ambassador to the emperor), Offaly’s traitorous purse bearer and one of his counsellors.Footnote 35 Two years later, rivals accused Grey and his servants of aiding O’Neill and invading his adversaries’ territories — a move made doubly suspicious by the presence in O’Neill’s country of ‘young Gerald’, who was followed within a month by the Geraldine traitor James Delahide and ‘and all that rable’. All this impeded the ‘king’s cause’ in Ireland. The lord deputy’s alleged machinations, for instance, were the purported means by which Brian O’Connor Faly, an old ally of Kildare, Lord Offaly’s brother-in-law, and the traitorous ‘scourge of the English pale’ who some charged was Grey’s right hand, ‘readopted and recoverid the possession of his cuntrey’. Lord James Butler, son of Piers Ruadh Butler, the Earl of Ossory, and heir to the Ormond estates, complained that Grey was deliberately sabotaging his ‘true service’ by warning Irish lords that they would never be in good dealings with the crown if they continued to support the earl. The sheer folly of his lunacy was so great that even the Irish, Lord James claimed in October 1539, ‘mervaile whie the Kinges Majestie puttith suche a man in soo high trust’.Footnote 36
III
Targeting English and Irish alike, the spectre of treason haunted the Lordship in the late 1530s, and it began to overlap with Grey’s critics’ hostile portrait of his demeanour in office. Crucially, it is the worlds of faction and intrigue, and deception and hidden motives, that such charges disclose — and the form hostility towards Grey took owed much to the new urgency the possibility of impure hearts and feigned obedience acquired in the 1530s. In the factious mires of Henrician ‘reform’, in other words, older concerns over dissimulation grew more acute.
A practice involving the modalities of ‘truth-telling’ in its ever-dangerous proximity to the sin of lying, dissimulation urgently raised the possibility that one’s inner thoughts, motivations or convictions did not align with their outward conduct. The problem of how inner and outer self related to truth in encounters with divine, ecclesiastical and civil authority had a long Christian history. It was rooted in scripture and the church fathers and had more recently been renewed in exhortations to adhere inwardly to Christ over mere external observance of ceremonies and precepts. Such were the hallmarks of the devotia moderna and other movements that by the sixteenth century were promoted by humanists, Catholics and Protestants alike across Europe.Footnote 37 All condemned any outward discharge of Christian duties that were insufficiently accompanied by inward conviction, which entailed whatever they conceived the proper ordering of the heart, will and conscience under God and earthly authority to be. By the Reformations, as many struggled to square competing obligations of obedience to divine and human authority while adhering to the precept that one must never lie or conceal their faith, dissimulation became a hotly contested strategy of evasion: some asserted that strategies of equivocation and mental reservation did not transgress God’s injunction against lying, while others emphatically denied that dissemblers were anything other than damnable liars. Footnote 38 For the Henrician regime, such wayward practices breached treason’s orbit: as the Bishop’s book put it, all who approached Christ with a disjointed heart and mouth, came to him as Judas, the ‘traitor’ and ‘deadly enemy’.Footnote 39
Surviving evidence has left no trace of crown officials in Henrician Ireland invoking Judas like this, but truth and lying as indices of Christian loyalty and its transgression are clear in other ways: for lay and clerical officers who loathed the alleged dissimulation of others, the practice was a marker of disorder. Its ubiquity as a moral problem was clear, the language of untruth manifold: in just one letter to Cromwell in 1536, for instance, Grey referred to ‘berer of tales’, ‘makers of bate, and lyars’, ‘manyfold invencions and seditions’ and ‘fals and slanderous matters’.Footnote 40 Of course, accusations of dissimulation — or its cognate terms: cloaked, feigned, paint, coloured, counterfeit, hypocrite — were certainly not new; to the contrary, they had long pervaded English criticisms of the Irish, particularly in their dealings with the crown. But the practice did acquire a different kind of weight in the 1530s. In England, with rising Erasmian and evangelical scorn for forged miracles, relics and the ‘idolatry’ they promoted, the period witnessed an intensification of official efforts to identify and denude all instances of fraud and deception, emblematic as these had become of papal falsity and threatening as they now were to Henrician power. Footnote 41 In Ireland after 1534–6, one’s ‘truth’ became tethered to rival attitudes toward the royal supremacy, ‘reform’ and the resulting divisions plaguing Dublin Castle. This effectively reconfigured the well-worn, chauvinistic English tendency of fulminating against Irish untrustworthiness and deceit just as it injected the continuously changing dynamics of faction with a newfound volatility. Dissimulation as a problem of individual moral ordering under God and prince was, therefore, not solely a matter of one’s attitude towards conformity nor did it merely raise probing questions about the integrity of one’s faith. More fundamentally, as a problem of Henrician ‘reform’, dissimulation was at its core equally a problem of sovereignty.
In late 1537, in a letter to the royal commissioners recently sent to Ireland to restore order and facilitate the passing of remaining ecclesiastical legislation, Cromwell deployed a litany of dissimulatory abuses in his rebuke of the Irish councillors. The king, he noted, marvelled that the traitor O’Connor could with his ‘deceytful submission and wyly words, so invegalel and blynde’ the administration ‘to geve any credains, or in any wyse trust suche a traytoor, or beleve that he wold be true to His Majesie, that so trayterously used hym self ofte tymes afore against His Grace, brekyng and violating the feythe and truthe of alegeaunce he ought to His Hignes’. Cromwell ordered the commissioners to use their office to ‘declare unto hym [Grey] his inconsiderat and neclegent oversight, to suffer hy mself to be thus begyled and traped by the deceptful submission, paynted wordes, and promyses of so arraunt a rebell’. Hopefully, Grey and others would thereby in the future be ‘more circumspect’ and ‘better advised’ on ‘how to deale and observe, with a strayghter order and keping, personages of suche disposition’.Footnote 42 Especially noteworthy in Cromwell’s charge is that not only was this a mark of O’Connor’s disordered state; the councillors’ alleged inability to see through the Irishman’s craftiness was also an indictment on their character. Grey apparently learned the lesson: two years later, he informed Cromwell that there was ‘noo ranker traytour inwardely in hys hart, which wolde appere, yf hys powre myght be corespondent unto hys malicious and frowarde minde towarde’ the king than O’Connor, ‘what so ever he sayth utwardelie’.Footnote 43
Of course, crown officials, too, at times embraced dissimulation — a salutary reminder of colonial double standards and the fluidity of ‘truth’ and ‘lying’ in the webs of Anglo-Irish intrigue and power. Some thought it was necessary to appease the ‘wilful appetite’ of a superior officer. Others thought it wise to infiltrate rebel circles or to ‘dissemble a peas’ either to win the confidence of the Irish lords whose obedience they wished to secure or to buy their time until they could strike a fatal blow. Still, Englishmen more often lambasted Irish and English ‘feyned surmises and promises’, dismissed as ‘colored matter[s]’. They condemned, too, the masking of ulterior motives or the ‘colorable hyding’ of ‘detestable crymes and offences’. Invocations of another’s dissembling ways also became a weapon wielded by councillors to denounce the transgressions and failures of their fellow officeholders.Footnote 44
Elsewhere, and in textbook Henrician fashion, the language of hypocrisy and ‘idolatry’ prevailed. Thomas Alen in late 1538 inveighed against the ‘masters of our law’ as ‘seche papists, ypocrites, and wurshippers of idolles’, while Lord James and his client, James White, condemned the population’s ‘pharasaycall serymonies and ipocrisy’.Footnote 45 Officials also assimilated dissimulation to the lying, seductive ways of devils. Robert Cowley, Lord James’s attorney and avowed critic of the Geraldines, complained that bishoprics in Ireland were too poor to sustain any honest man so that only ‘Irishe papisticall wreches’ inhabited them. Such wretches ‘not onlie delite in Irishe condicions living by ravyne and clokid extorcions but allure and excite others to the same by their pernycious example’. Footnote 46 If Grey later lamented that certain problems ‘so colerablye handelyd’ were a ‘gret hinderance of the comon weyll, and to the servyce that we myght doo’, complicating matters further were the ‘maynteners of many theyvs and outlawes’. As he put it: ‘I thinke verelye, that theyr ys no more falsehede in all the devylles of Hell, then doyth remain in theym.’ Footnote 47 Equally revealing, fears of lying and the doubt and mistrust it bred inflected major tools in the legal and ecclesiastical toolkit of ‘reform’, including parliamentary statutes from 1536–7 and Archbishop Browne’s ‘Form of the Beads’ and clerical injunctions of 1538. Calls for sincere preaching and to compel ‘unfeigned’ clerical declarations of allegiance ‘without colour and fraud’ abounded, while actions undertaken during the 1537 parliament against the clerical proctors, who staunchly refused to endorse the Reformation, explicitly aimed to prevent the ‘devillishe abuses and usurped aucthoritie and jurisdiction of the busshop of Rome’. The immediate goal? That ‘some good and godlie reformacion thereof might be had and provyded’.Footnote 48
IV
By 1537–8, treason and dissimulation had for some become thorny causes of disorder. Certainly, tropes of idolatrous and wicked living were polemical devices mobilised by different people to different ends. One may reasonably suggest that men like Grey, Cowley and Lord James adopted such language strategically rather than out of conviction: after all, denouncing someone as idolatrous, evil or deceitful was effective, particularly when it aligned with Whitehall’s vision for the ‘reformation of Ireland’ or with the crown’s claims against Rome. Officials, too, bemoaned widespread hypocrisy in ways that channelled personal hatreds and reiterated an older hostility towards the island’s inhabitants. Yet, the rationales and animosities that fueled factional strife, while certainly not always rooted in spiritual zeal, cannot be separated from a Christian moral framework that pit cunning and deceit against honesty and integrity, all of which were by the 1530s laden with connotations of loyalty either to the crown or Rome. It was to this new reality that factionally-charged accusations of treason and dissimulation gave expression. As we shall now see, central to this new environment were those whom many lamented were particularly egregious offenders amongst the land’s purported liars and devils: the friars. With the friars acquiring pride of place on the Henrician mantle of ‘papistical wretches’, the worlds of Tudor and papal, and English and Irish, devotional life and holiness became troubled receptacles of embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties.
Renowned as preachers and revered across the island, the Conventual and especially Observant Franciscans had since the fifteenth century made major inroads in both Gaelic and English Ireland outside the Pale.Footnote 49 They were vociferous opponents of, and formidable obstacles, to Henry VIII’s policies — and they were well connected with their English and continental brethren: intensifying their activities in Ireland as early as 1534, they became key agents in the Reformation and anti-Tudor intrigue linking Ulster, Scotland and Rome with which Grey was to become associated, as we shall see later.Footnote 50 The problems they posed for Tudor rule were aggravated by the unintended consequences of the dissolution campaign: many among those whose religious houses were dissolved between 1537–41 simply continued their pastoral duties as before.Footnote 51
The language with which crown servants condemned the friars embodied all dimensions of spiritual and civil (dis)order — dissimulation, idolatry, devilry — that were seen to violate Christ and the king’s sovereignty in the wake of the Reformation. ‘Where they rule’, Browne notified Cromwell in 1538, ‘Godd and Kyng cannot justlye reign.’ The archbishop soon after complained that the country was filled with the ‘adversaries of Godes Worde’ who ‘fayne theymselves outwardely to be the mayntayners of the Gospell’ yet ‘it is not inwardely conseyved in theire hartes’: ‘I pray God’ that ‘dissimulacion may ons be roated out.’Footnote 52 These ‘false and craftye bludsukkers’, as Agard called them, were the antitheses of the ‘true’ royal servant, their ‘fayned holynesse’ and desires to be ‘estemed like yong Godes’ luring men away from Christ and from knowledge of both God and duty to prince.Footnote 53 Their priestly prerogative, the hearing of confession, was also a troubling site of treasonous activity: ‘yow may perceyve ther towardnes’, Browne warned, ‘and yet greate men yn these parties maye evyll spare them, for ther auricular confessyon; for they may be bold to utter unto them treason and other.’Footnote 54
Indeed, pastoral and liturgical activities raised many alarms. Reports from Galway referred to clerics preaching ‘after tholde soarte and facion’ or to sermons among the Irishry that declared that all ought, ‘for the salvacion of his sowle’, wage war against the king and his ‘trewe subjectes’.Footnote 55 Henry VIII’s ongoing assault on ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’ was also condemned in sermons: a Franciscan in Waterford, for instance, was arrested by the mayor, Thomas Lombard, for preaching that ‘No man have aucthoritie to breke or put down churchis, and make them prophan places’.Footnote 56 By 1538, Grey himself was accused of favouring the pope and, later, shielding friars in Galway from the administration. Furthermore, just before releasing a bishop and friar imprisoned in Dublin Castle, he had also devoutly knelt before the ‘Idoll of Trym’ (the Our Lady statue in Trim, County Meath) while hearing ‘thre or fower masses’.Footnote 57
Such concerns over proper devotion and the unlawful profaning of space get to the heart of the matter: the disputed status of holiness. ‘Holiness’ could be profaned in numerous ways. A space of sanctuary, a sacred site — such as a well, pilgrimage destination or church — or a spiritual person or office could be defiled, and sacred objects could be misused or destroyed. Conversely, something profane — whether a person, a space or an object — could be falsely revered as holy.Footnote 58 In this lay the diametrically opposed understandings of saints in, say, the Henrician formularies of faith, where they were held as mere exemplars of piety, and in the Ulster lord, Manus O’Donnell’s Beatha Colaim Chille (‘Life of Colum Cille’), completed in 1532, in which Saints Patrick and Colum Cille possess tremendous intercessory powers that rivalled those of Christ; this was in fact a common feature of bardic devotional poetry.Footnote 59 In this, too, lay Agard’s outrage that the Observants ‘wilbe called moste hollyeste, soo that ther remaynz more vertu in on of ther coottes and knottyd gyrdylles, then ever was in Criste, and His Paschion’, or Tyndale’s comparison of deluded prayer in the hopes of securing salvation through the merits of saints with a man losing his wit in St Patrick’s Purgatory, County Donegal.Footnote 60
Disputed understandings of the sanctity or profanity of places, peoples and things, and of their spiritual and worldly status as indices of law and order under God, prince and pope, were precisely what coalesced in representations of Grey as English and Irish attitudes towards sacralisation and profanation created explosive points of conflict.Footnote 61 For Tudor ‘reformers’, Grey violated God’s word by abetting the devilish friars and upholding ‘papists’ and papal jurisdiction. To those who loathed the king’s Reformation, Grey and his fellow heretics sullied the holy fabric of socio-devotional life by destroying relics and defiling holy sites and monasteries. For this, the culprits incurred the wrathful vengeance of God and resident saints. According to the Annals of Connacht, for instance, Grey was executed not only for fraternising with Offaly, for allowing his followers to maraud or for partiality in matters of justice; it was also because he desecrated a church.Footnote 62 Indeed, the Irish annals not only condemned the crown’s iconoclastic campaign of 1539; they also erroneously identified Grey as spearheading it (see below).Footnote 63 But Browne and others’ condemnation of Grey’s ‘papistical’ ways intersected with the annalists’ lamentations over his sacrilegious and ‘heretical’ actions insofar as both saw him as a defiler of Christian order, though they did so through rival registers of holiness and sovereignty. This imparted a paradoxical status to Grey as both idolater and iconoclast, a man who, failing in his obedience to the pope, also fell short of fully siding with the regime against Rome. It was through these fluid spiritual and worldly horizons of Christian life and polemic that treason and dissimulation polarised politics in the Pale.
V
We return now to the Kildare Rebellion, which from its beginning underscored the polarising potential of the Reformation in Ireland. In these times of war, rebellion and international intrigue, the crystallisation of one unity, the king’s ‘true and faithful subjects’, was accompanied by its opposite. In the autumn of 1534, Lord Offaly and several of his men were publicly cursed by the Metropolitan See of Dublin for murdering John Alen, then archbishop of Dublin, which also declared all those who harboured or aided the traitors to be similarly accursed.Footnote 64 By May 1535, with clerical support for Offaly’s Rebellion widespread, loyal subjects saw the reigning chaos as empowering priests and other outlaws and traitors to the detriment of those who remained faithful to God and the king. Footnote 65 The rhetoric of the Henrician Reformation provided ample fodder for such a shift, while rebels’ own actions invigorated the lines already drawn in the sand. Offaly tendered oaths to his allies and across the Pale to serve him against the accursed king just as he and his adherents allegedly boasted of being of the pope’s ‘secte and bande’. He also sent men to Rome to be absolved of the murder of Archbishop Alen, to prove that England held Ireland on papal permission and to convince the pope to declare all subjects’ bonds of allegiance forfeited by virtue of the king’s heresy.Footnote 66 All such activities provided a groundwork for a polarised vocabulary that would intimately link the Geraldines with Grey under the umbrella of papistical dissent.
How the regime enforced the Reformation is of particular significance here. As much as the Irish Council’s journey into Munster in 1538 to administer the oath of supremacy was an effort to bolster their reformist credentials by aligning their campaign with the directions then pursued in England, it was also designed to delegitimise what they regarded as Grey’s ‘pro-Geraldine, and papistically inclined, governmental strategy’.Footnote 67 Then, in February 1539, Cromwell finally heeded Browne and others’ requests and established a special commission tasked with suppressing religious houses and destroying images — and it was to be headed by Grey’s opponents in the Irish Council, a move that undermined his authority as governor.Footnote 68 The activities of the ‘Geraldine League’ in 1539–40, this near island-wide alliance of Irish and English-Irish lords headed by Desmond and his Ulster allies, Conn O’Neill and Manus O’Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell, further complicated matters. Benefiting from the widespread prestige of the ‘cult of Kildare’, the ‘League’ sought the restoration of ‘young Gerald’ as earl.Footnote 69 The master of the rolls, John Alen, toed the official line when he complained that ‘the Bishop of Rome is the oonlie auctor of this ther detestable purpoos, and the King of Scots a speciall cumforter and abetter’ of their efforts to ‘exclude the King from all his Regalitie’ in Ireland. Footnote 70 Indeed, by 1539, the Geraldines could be ‘painted as the Irish equivalent of Poles and Courtenays’, the architects of the recently thwarted Exeter Conspiracy in England to replace Henry VIII with Henry Courtenay, first marquess of Exeter.Footnote 71
In this environment, Grey’s Geraldine connections and association with traitors hardened rhetorically around the poles of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ and into an image of tyranny incarnate. His critics claimed that he privileged the ‘noghti sedicious counsels of the Geraldine sect’ while ‘declynyng from the good counsaill of the Kinges Prive Counsailloures’.Footnote 72 Others condemned his helpers’ actions as being ‘disagreant to the dueti of a trew subject’, while Lord James charged that he ‘thretnes every man after suche a tyrannyus sorte’. No man, he continued, ‘dare speke or repugne reasonably against his appetite; more then I, or any other true Christen man, durst speke against the Bisshope of Romes usurped auctorytie … of whos secte he is chief and principall in this land’.Footnote 73 The chasm between ‘true subjects’ and ‘papists’ and the Geraldine ‘band’ or ‘sect’ was explicit. ‘But I pray God’, Thomas Alen noted, ‘all we, that been the Kingis true subjectis (neither of the Geraldine bande, ne papistes), may witnesse the good success thereof in tyme comyng’.Footnote 74 The English courtier and future secretary of state, Thomas Wriothesley, even recommended appointing a secret counsel that excluded all those of the Geraldine sect.Footnote 75 Meanwhile, Cowley argued that Grey’s abuses ‘subdue the Kinges true subgiets’ and ‘extolle and erect the Geraldyne secte’ whose members were ‘papists’ (he ‘atollerat the papistes favourably’) and ‘traitors’ (‘the Geraldynes, and their secte, with other the Kinges rebelles and traitoures’).Footnote 76 Royal government and the ‘subduyng of Irishmen’, he alleged in a highly pro-Butler account of his own loyal service, would never proceed to good effect so long as the ‘Geraldynes secte’ was in authority. Deploying a pastoral metaphor of spiritual care, it was for Cowley a matter of God imparting light to separate the ‘chaffe from the clene corne, and the infected pestiferous shepe from the clene shepe’.Footnote 77
With clear echoes of the spectre of dissimulation, the ‘Geraldine heart’ was now counterpoised to that of the true subject. For Alen and Aylmer, Grey had ‘lost the hartes of the Kinges subjectes’. In his defence of the vice-treasurer, William Brabazon, Agard argued that it was only those who owed their hearts to the Geraldines and were ‘bronde at the hertes with a “G” for the same’ who would not admit to Brabazon’s qualities. Footnote 78 Language invoking the secretive ways of the land’s dissemblers also entered the fray, with Grey accused of having ‘secrete intelligences’ and resorting ‘togidder in secretenes’ with the ‘Geraldene secte’ along with those he allured into their midst. Footnote 79 By June 1538, Grey had in the eyes of his detractors morphed into the late tyrannical and traitorous earl himself: as Lord James put it, ‘My Lord Deputie is the Erle of Kildare newly borne againe’.Footnote 80 Although a ploy of faction, the remark also reflected a certain truth: stepping into the power vacuum created by the abolition of the earldom, Grey had by necessity come to occupy the position of his late brother-in-law. Governing Ireland depended on it.Footnote 81 But the statement also evidenced how treason helped recalibrate the line between ‘English subject’ and ‘Irish enemy’ by alluding to the ‘becoming-Irish’ of the English lord deputy — a move that connoted the misrule and disorderliness that many feared triumphed when the Lordship itself risked losing its ‘English’ character.Footnote 82
Ultimately, Grey and the council may have informed Cromwell in March 1540 that a unified administration worked against the oath-bound forces of the ‘disloyal tyrannous traitors’ but it was too late.Footnote 83 Nor did his insistence that, contrary to those who suspected that he aided his nephew, the ‘young Gerald’, he was in fact adamant about his desire to retrieve him for the crown, change anything.Footnote 84 After years of identifying the pope as the cause of all disorder in the land, and after the regime’s efforts to neutralise subversive intrigue with foreign powers, alliances between Irish, Scottish and continental powers crystallised into traitorous emblems of the machinations of both Grey and Rome. With the Geraldines becoming a ‘sect’, its members deemed traitors and ‘rank papists’, it was the authors of the ‘articles of treason’ against Grey in late 1540 who gave the anti-Tudor camp its axiomatic designation as a papal and traitorous unity under Grey’s leadership. The lord deputy, now allegedly conspiring with the ‘unofficial coordinator of anti-Tudor activities’, Cardinal Reginald Pole,Footnote 85 appeared not only as the beleaguered governor whose secretive confederacies incited insurrections against the king and his subjects. He now morphed into the endgame of anti-papal and Geraldine rhetoric: the disordered and tyrannical leader of the ‘Geraldyne and papisticall traitorus secte’.Footnote 86
VI
In the fallout of the Kildare Rebellion and Reformation, the age-old problems of treason and dissimulation, as emblems of disorderly transgressions, now newly reflected the terms of embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties. The spectre of (real or imagined) invasions of one or more of the archipelagic islands loomed large, reinforcing the already hefty demands of Henrician obedience after the break with Rome. The question of one’s allegiance to God, king or pope remodulated local factional strife just as crown officials grew wearier of, and weaponised, the perceived disjunction between the inner disposition and outward conduct of the island’s inhabitants. In this volatile climate, as English-Irish and Irish intrigue with the Scots, the French, the Habsburgs and Rome intensified, what it meant to be a ‘true’ Christian subject changed. The result was that, between 1534–40, the terms of Henrician order catalysed around starkly demarcated opposites: the ‘true’ crown subject and the Geraldine, papistical, devilish traitor. A ‘true heart’, as opposed to a ‘Geraldine heart’, anchored the division as a certain sign of who was a ‘true’ crown subject. Captured, as it were, by the light of Henry VIII, this ‘lanterne to all other good Christen Princes’, as Lord James put it in 1538,Footnote 87 ‘true subjects’ rejected papal darkness and the traitorous, idolatrous and dissembling ways of Rome’s acolytes, the exemplars of which were the friars, the Geraldines and Lord Deputy Grey.
Years after Grey’s execution as a traitor in July 1541, dissimulation’s proximity to treason remained albeit in modified form. By 1545, it was Grey’s successor, Lord Deputy Anthony St Leger, who was now the target of factional conspiracies as the Butlers and others accused him of treason, of associating with unseemly types, and of empowering the king’s ‘ancient enemies’.Footnote 88 As written in one letter to the English Privy Council, ‘All Irlande doo knowe that the Deputie is the moste dissembler, and moste craftiest man, that ever came amonge them. And seeing that by crafte and falsehed he seithe the land nigh cast away, he wolde torne his faulte upon others that do worke with trouthe. It were better than he, and all suche false doers in Irlande, were hanged, rather than the King shuld folowe their crafte.’Footnote 89 Yet unlike Grey, such associations with St Leger were shorn of their papistical and devilish hues. Grey’s ‘becoming’ the leader of the ‘Geraldine and papistical traitorous sect’ harnessed into a single figurehead his association with the staunchest enemies of Tudor rule, the friars and the Geraldines. To his allies, Grey was a staunch defender of English rule doing what was necessary for God, king and commonwealth. To his detractors, he was a Geraldine-like tyrant and a duplicitous abettor of Rome and its dissembling and traitorous acolytes. For the Irish, he was a formidable justiciar of the king, a heretic and a defamer of all that was holy.
The impact of the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, in short, far exceeded the rather limited success of its ecclesiastical programme, and one way to assess this impact is to examine how, in the wake of the Kildare Rebellion, the problems of treason and dissimulation redrew the fault lines of Christian moral order and sovereignty. For the regime’s apologists, Henrician kingship and law after the break with Rome reflected the tenets of divinely sanctioned order. Charges of treason and dissimulation as transgressions of that order proliferated in the folds of rebellion, factional intrigue and ‘reform’ as polemical devices in the battles that pit English and Irish, and royal and papal, custodians of spiritual and civil order against each other. At the centre of these struggles lay Lord Deputy Leonard Grey. Grey’s unique position and the circumstances of his rule turned him into a hall of mirrors through which the disputed images of early Reformation papal and Henrician sovereignties were refracted. He was certainly not the only point of contact between these worlds. But as lord deputy, he remained one of the most visible and consequential nodes of Anglo-Irish encounter through which a Reformation Tudor order in Henrician Ireland was consolidated, polarised and ultimately subverted.
Though but a narrow window of Irish history, successful Henrician efforts to label as treason all opposition to the Reformation cast a long shadow on dissident activity and communities on either side of the Irish Sea.Footnote 90 Indeed, it was under Elizabeth I that confessional battlelines first emerged in Ireland to become an explosive source of polarised conflict as the island became an unstable theatre of inter-European dynastic and spiritual strife.Footnote 91 In this environment, the typology of treason again changed, with certain New English Protestants distinguishing between ‘open’ and ‘secret’ traitors, the latter characterised as those who covertly aided those in open arms against the crown.Footnote 92 Historians have rightfully made much of such dynamics, seeing in them a clear departure from the comparatively more muted early Reformation. Important as these are, the reign of Henry VIII, however, should not be neglected. For in Grey’s portrait as the leader of the ‘Geraldine and papistical traitorous sect’, we confront in a similarly broad, European arena of Reformation polemic and intrigue a distinctly Henrician and pre-confessional polarisation of political life in Ireland.
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