When Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen few of her subjects were in any doubt about the religious significance of her accession. The prospect that the old religion would receive official sanction once again was generally welcomed in Ireland. However, while there is no doubting the existence of this residual affection, the common assumption that it led to a relatively smooth and trouble-free process of Catholic restoration is more questionable. Certainly, this was not the case in the diocese of Dublin. Here, the restoration of Catholicism was neither carried forward upon a groundswell of popular affection for traditional religion nor relief that Edwardian Protestantism was about to be abolished. Nor was it even driven primarily by a determined queen through her officials in the Irish administration. Rather, the impetus for restoration came from a group of senior diocesan clergy whose actions on behalf of the old religion would provoke opposition at the highest level of the Irish administration. It was an unusual feature of the Marian restoration, which gives the lie to the belief that it, alone of all the religious settlements promoted in sixteenth-century Ireland, failed to engender any controversy.

That the senior clergy of Dublin would play such a prominent role in restoring the old religion in their diocese could not have been easily predicted at the outset of Mary's reign, for one simple reason. Clerical leadership in the diocese had been dealt an apparently fatal blow at the end of Henry VIII's reign because of the dissolution of St Patrick's Cathedral.