The Cambridge History of Ireland by Brendan Smith

Author:Brendan Smith [Smith, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

The ‘Act for kingly title’ and the wider strategy of which it was a part could not erase centuries of antagonism and war – whether we view it as real or as partly an English legal and cultural construct – between English and Irish in Ireland. In short, making Ireland into a kingdom in the image of England in the conciliatory manner espoused by St Leger would take decades and require the unswerving commitment of the king of England. But the new Edwardian regime was not prepared to wait. The willingness of Protector Somerset to increase military expenditure in Ireland, principally on the establishment of forts manned by garrisons of English soldiers beyond the western and southern extremities of the Pale, to complement and expedite St Leger’s strategy allowed Tudor officials in England and Ireland once again to envision the reform of Ireland in more traditionally war-like terms. The subsequent decision taken by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, who overthrew Somerset in late 1549, to curtail royal expenditure in Ireland by reappointing St Leger only served further to muddle the character and aims of English government in the new Tudor kingdom.72

The Ireland of 1550 was a different place than the country whose future eighty years earlier hinged on the latest manifestation of dynastic strife in England. The Wars of the Roses, and the instability they periodically wrought in Ireland, were by then a distant memory. The Tudors had ushered in not only dynastic stability but also a sustained period, especially evident under Henry VIII, of political centralisation around the crown in which the English territories were settled within the Tudor monarchy. Edward VI, the third Tudor to occupy the throne, wielded more power in Ireland than any English king since the thirteenth century. Ireland, once a frontier region remote from the centre of English power, was by 1550 a kingdom with a Protestant church, its people were Tudor subjects and its government was more closely controlled from London than at any time in the 300-year history of the Anglo-Irish relationship. Ireland, it appeared, had in these years exited one era and entered another. But, as this chapter has shown, these changes were often deeply rooted in what had come before. It is only by looking broadly at what was an eighty-year period of accumulated change that the differences between the Ireland of 1470 and 1550 are evident. The extent of change which had occurred must not be exaggerated. Ireland may have been a kingdom by 1550, but it bore little resemblance to the other Tudor kingdom: royal authority in Ireland was barely felt outside of Leinster where life carried on much as it had in 1470 (and before); the Church of Ireland had yet to put down firm roots; several of the ‘surrender and regrant’ settlements were breaking down; and the constitutional status of Irishmen as subjects of the crown remained ambiguous – nearly twenty Irishmen are known to have received grants of English liberty in 1550 alone.73 It may be argued, then, that Ireland was a kingdom only in name by the middle of the sixteenth century.

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