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Women and the Reformation in Tudor Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2022

HENRY A. JEFFERIES
HENRY A. JEFFERIES*
Affiliation:
Magee Campus, Ulster University, Northland Road, Derry, BT48 7JL, Northern Ireland
*
E-mail: henryjefferies@icloud.com
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Abstract

This paper addresses a major historical lacuna by highlighting some of the ways through which women helped to shape Irish responses to the English Reformation in Ireland. It reveals that women were often key to a web of contacts linking English resistance to the Tudors’ reformations to Irish resistance. It affirms that women played a significant role in the Reformation in Tudor Ireland, not least of all in its ultimate failure. Because virtually no Irish women became Protestants in the sixteenth century, though a small number of Irish men was converted, no self-perpetuating indigenous community of Irish Protestants was generated.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 525 - 551
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2022

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References

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36 L&P viii. 716; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: a life, London 2018, 405–7. I am very indebted to Professor MacCulloch for tracing Frances's fate after the rebellion and for all his sage comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

37 L&P xv. 225.

38 L&P xv. 286.

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40 MacCulloch, Cromwell, 487, 490, 495, 497, 509, 513.

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43 Mayer, ‘Geoffrey Pole’.

44 CRP i, no. 258; Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: the first queen, Hachette Digital, 2010 edn, 21, 24, 131–2.

45 Personal correspondence with Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch.

46 Steven Ellis, ‘Elizabeth FitzGerald [née Grey], countess of Kildare (fl. 1514–48)’, ODNB online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/69231>.

47 Ibid; Rex, ‘Adrian Fortescue’.

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50 MacCulloch, Cromwell, 56.

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52 Bernard, The king's Reformation, 203–5.

53 Hoyle, ‘Darcy’; ‘Hussey’; and The Pilgrimage of Grace and the politics of the 1530s, Oxford 2001, 406–7; Bernard, The king's Reformation, 401, 403.

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58 Lennon, Stanihurst, 24–5; Vincent P. Carey, Surviving the Tudors: the ‘wizard’ earl of Kildare and English rule in Ireland, Dublin 2002, 172.

59 Barbara J. Harris, English aristocratic women, 1450–1550: marriage and family, property and careers, Oxford 2002, 59, 64.

60 MacCulloch, Cromwell, 48–9.

61 L&P xv. 775; Jefferies, Irish Church, 84–5; Stanihurst, Historie, 108–9; MacCulloch, Cromwell, 522–3.

62 Mayer, ‘William Peto [Peyto] (c. 1485–1558)’, ODNB online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref.odnb/22043>.

63 Bernard, The king's Reformation, 20, 77, 153–4.

64 Ibid. 87; Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Print, orality and communications in the Maid of Kent affair’, this Journal lii (2001), 21–33.

65 Peter Marshall, Heretics and believers: a history of the English Reformation, New Haven–London 2017, 213.

66 Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, London 1963 edn, 215–19; Porter, Mary Tudor, 83–4.

67 Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 260–1, 308–10; Porter, Mary Tudor, 83–7ff.

68 Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 283.

69 Ibid. 283–91; Bernard, The king's Reformation, 79.

70 David Loades, Mary Tudor, Stroud 2011, 45.

71 Bernard, The king's Reformation, 154.

72 CSP, Spain, v/1, no. 70.

73 J. J. Scarisbrick, ‘Fisher, Henry viii and the Reformation crisis’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (eds), Humanism, reform and the Reformation: the career of Bishop John Fisher, Cambridge 1989, 156–7.

74 Campion, Historie, 175–6.

75 Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 283–91.

76 A. B. Emden, A biographical register of the university of Oxford, A.D. 1501–1540, Oxford 1974, 575; Edwards, R. D., ‘Venerable John Travers and the rebellion of Silken Thomas’, Studies xxiii (1934), 687–99Google Scholar.

77 Stanihurst, Historie, 99; Emden, Biographical register, 575; Edwards, ‘Venerable John Travers’, 687–99; MacCulloch, Cromwell, 256.

78 Stanihurst, Historie, 91.

79 Henry A. Jefferies, ‘Dr George Cromer, archbishop of Armagh (1521–1543), and Henry viii's Reformation’, in A. J. Hughes and William Nolan (eds), Armagh: history and society, Dublin 2001, 218.

80 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, 136–8.

81 Campion, Historie, 176; Stanihurst, Historie, 100. Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Foreign involvement in the revolt of Silken Thomas, 1534–5’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy xcviC (1996), 58; Conleth Manning, ‘The grave-slab of Charles Reynolds in Rome’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland cxl (2010), 22–7.

82 Geoffrey Elton, Police and policy: the enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell, Cambridge 1972; Christopher Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 105–51; Shagan, ‘Print, orality and communications’, 21–33; Marshall, Heretics and believers, 163–243.

83 Muríosa Prendergast, ‘The Geraldine League: the attempted restoration of the house of Kildare or a study in political opportunism’, JCKAS xix (2004–5), 463.

84 Stanihurst, Historie, 108; Ellis, ‘Elizabeth FitzGerald’.

85 Stanihurst, Historie, 102–4; CRP, no. 191.

86 Stanihurst, Historie, 108–9; MacCulloch, Cromwell, 522–3; Carey, ‘Wizard’ earl, 48.

87 Prendergast, ‘The Geraldine league’, 460–73.

88 Ellis, ‘Elizabeth FitzGerald’.

89 Harris, English aristocratic women, 140–3, and ‘Defining themselves: English aristocratic women, 1450–1550’, Journal of British Studies xlix (2010), 734–52.

90 Carey, ‘Wizard’ earl, 57.

91 Jefferies, Henry A., ‘The Marian restoration in Ireland’, British Catholic History xxxiii (2016), 16–20Google Scholar.

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93 Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 151. Ambivalence about having a female monarch is reflected in the 7th baron of Howth's book which he compiled in the 1570s: Valerie McGowan-Doyle, The book of Howth: Elizabethan conquest and the Old English, Cork 2011, 83–5, 104.

94 Michael C. Questier, Catholicism, and community in early modern England: politics, aristocratic patronage and religion, c. 1550-1640, Cambridge 2006, 78.

95 David Finnegan, ‘Gerald Fitzgerald, 11th earl of Kildare’, ODNB online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref.odnb/9557>; Carey, ‘Wizard’ earl, 58; Questier, Catholicism, 68, 92–3.

96 Questier, Catholicism, 113,

97 John Neale, Elizabeth I and her parliaments, London 1953, 120; Roger B. Manning, Religion and society in Elizabethan Sussex, Leicester 1969, 34–5; J. G. Elzinga, ‘Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu (1528–92)’, ODNB online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref.odnb/3667>; Questier, Catholicism, 117–18, 136–9.

98 Manning, Religion and society, 40–1, 44n, 54n, 154, 228–9; Questier, Catholicism, 83.

99 G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the earl of Southampton, Cambridge, Ma 1968, 8; Elzinga, ‘Anthony Browne’; Questier, Catholicism, 144–6.

100 Sir W. St Leger to Burghley, 24 Sept. 1580, TNA, SP 63/76/56; Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England, 1541–1588: ‘our way of proceeding?’, Leiden–New York–Köln 1996, 108–31; Jefferies, Irish Church, 215; Elzinga, ‘Anthony Browne’; Kilroy, Campion, 144–85.

101 Sir Henry Wallop to Sir Francis Walsingham, 18 Feb. 1581, SP 63/80/1; Wallop to Walsingham, SP 63/80/11; Chancellor Gerrard to Walsingham, 18 Feb. 1581, SP 63/80/61; Carey, ‘Wizard’ earl, 207; Jefferies, Irish Church, 215.

102 Gerrard to Walsingham, 18 Feb. 1581, SP 63/80/61; Jefferies, Irish Church, 215.

103 Examination of Christopher Barnewall, 12 Aug. 1583, SP 63/104/38.

104 Jefferies, Irish Church, 214–16. Vincent Carey, though anxious to exonerate the earl of any responsibility, admitted that ‘on the face of it the evidence against the earl was pretty convincing’: ‘Wizard’ earl, 206.

105 Christopher Barnewall's confession, 28 Aug. 1583, SP 63/104/38.

106 Manning, Religion and society, 154; Questier, Catholicism, 155–6.

107 Carey, ‘Wizard’ earl.

108 K. J. Kesselring, The Northern rebellion, of 1569: faith, politics and protest in Elizabethan England, Basingstoke 2010, 140.

109 Weisner, ‘Women's response to the Reformation’, 168, and ‘Nuns, wives and mothers and the Reformation in Germany’, in Sherrin Marshall (ed.), Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: private and public worlds, Bloomington–Indianapolis 1989, 21–3; David P. Daniel, ‘Piety, politics and perversion: noblewomen in Reformation Hungary’, in Marshall, Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, 68–85. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City women and religious change’, in her Society and culture in early modern France, Stanford, Ca 1975 edn, 65–96.

110 Rachel R. Reid, ‘The rebellion of the earls, 1569’, TRHS xx (1906), 196; Kesselring, The Northern rebellion, 46; Jefferies, Irish Church, 216. This analogy was pointed out to me by Peter Marshall.

111 Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and reformation, Westport, Cn–London 1983, 165–6. Northumberland was subsequently sent back to England and was executed. His wife settled in the Spanish Netherlands, where she received a pension from Philip ii, and dedicated her energies to campaigning for a Catholic restoration in Britain.

112 Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 283–91; Bernard argued that popular sympathy in England for Catherine of Aragon was not matched by any political commitment to challenge the king: The king's Reformation, 199–213. No doubt, the sympathy felt towards Catherine and Mary was qualified by the fact that the English generally shared Henry viii's desire for a male heir to the throne.

113 Jefferies, Henry A., ‘Why the Reformation failed in Ireland’, IHS xl (2016), 168Google Scholar.

114 Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1600–1, ccvii/6, ed. Ernest George Atkinson, London 1905, no. 126.

115 Henry A. Jefferies, ‘Tudor reformations in Cork’, in Salvador Ryan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Religion and politics in urban Ireland, c. 1500–c. 1750, Dublin 2016, 65–6.

116 Nicholas Canny, ‘Galway: from the Reformation to the penal laws’, in Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill (ed.), Galway: town and gown, 1484–1984, Dublin 1984, 8.

117 Charles Richard Elrington, The life of the Most Rev. James Ussher, DD, Dublin–London 1848, 1–2. A handful of other women who had Protestant fathers and husbands were probably Protestant too: Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 137–8.

118 Cynthia Wittman Zollinger, ‘“The booke, the leafe, yea and the very sentence”: sixteenth century literacy in text and context’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and his world, Aldershot 2017, 105–6.

119 Katharine Simms, ‘Women in Gaelic society during the age of transition’, in MacCurtain and O'Dowd, Women in early modern Ireland, 32–42; Elizabeth McKenna, ‘The gift of a lady: women as patrons of the arts in medieval Ireland’, in Meek, Women in renaissance and early modern Europe, 84–94; Mary O'Dowd, A history of women in Ireland: 1500–1800, Harlow 2005, 153–66; Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women; and most important, Dianne Hall, Women and the Church in medieval Ireland, c.1140–1540, Dublin 2003. For comparison see Barbara Harris, English aristocratic women's religious patronage, 1450–1550: the fabric of piety, Amsterdam 2018.

120 Register of wills and inventories of the diocese of Dublin, 1457–83, ed. H. F. Berry, Dublin 1898; Jefferies, Henry A., ‘Men, women, the late medieval Church and religion: evidence from wills from County Dublin’, Archivium Hibernicum lxix (2016), 339–49Google Scholar; Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, 1400–1580, New Haven–London 1992, 354–67.

121 Jefferies, ‘Men, women and religion’, 348.

122 Christine Peters, Patterns of piety: women, gender and religion in late medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge 2008 edn, 51–5.

123 Jefferies, ‘Men, women and religion’, 344, 348–9; Patricia Crawford, Women and religion in England, 1500–1720, London–New York 1996 edn, 24.

124 Register of wills, 51–5, 55–6, 104–5.

125 Inside a church: ibid. 1–2, 3–4, 11–13, 45–7, 55–6, 75–6, 102–3, 104–5, 133–6, 142–4, 155–6. In the cemetery: ibid. 5–6, 47–8, 51–5, 63–4, 125–7, 159–62.

126 Ibid. 13–15, 58–60, 118–20, 120–2, 136–8. For confraternities in Ireland see Colm Lennon, ‘The confraternities and cultural duality in Ireland, 1450–1550’, in Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (eds), Early modern confraternities in Europe and the Americas, Aldershot 2006, 35–52, and Jefferies, Irish Church, 61–4. Wealthy women formed a significant minority of the members of the Guild of Christ Church, Dublin, but only a minority: Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic women, 93.

127 Jefferies, ‘Men, women and religion’, 349.

128 SP 63/156/37.

129 The Irish sections of Fynes Moryson's unpublished Itinerary, ed. Graham Kew, Dublin 1998, 92.

130 Lord Justice Pelham to Walsingham, 29 July 1580, SP 63/74/75.

131 Colm Lennon, ‘Mass in the manor house: the Counter-Reformation in Dublin, 1560–1630’, in James Kelly and Daire Keogh (eds), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin, Dublin 2000, 117.

132 Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, 43.

133 Jefferies, Irish Church, 255.

134 Lord Deputy FitzWilliam and Chancellor Loftus to Burghley and Walsingham, 26 Feb. 1590, SP 63/150/74.

135 Sir John Dowdall to Burghley, 9 Mar. 1596, SP 63/187/19.

136 W. M. Brady, State papers concerning the Irish Church, London 1868, no. xxv.

137 William G. Neely, Kilkenny: an urban history, 1391–1843, Belfast 1989, 44.

138 Petition of John Thornburgh, bishop of Limerick, SP 63/177/55.

139 Myles Ronan, The Reformation in Ireland under Elizabeth, London 1930, 476, 480, 483.

140 Ibid. 477. Nicholas Canny admitted that ‘few if any’ were converted in the Pale in Elizabeth's reign: ‘Why the Reformation failed’, 432.

141 Ronan, Reformation in Ireland, 483.

142 Thomas J. Morrisey, ‘David Wolfe (1528–78/9)’, ODNB online, <https://doi.org/ref.odnb/29832>.

143 Ronan, Reformation in Ireland, 482.

144 Ibid.

145 Ellis, Steven, ‘John Bale, bishop of Ossory, 1552–3’, Journal of the Butler Society iii (1984), 288Google Scholar.

146 Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, 50–1.

147 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, 39; Simms, ‘Women in Gaelic society’, 32.

148 Simms, ‘Women in Gaelic society’, 32.

149 Jefferies, Priests and prelates, 138.

150 McShane, Bronagh, ‘Negotiating religious change and conflict: female religious communities in early modern Ireland, c. 1530–c. 1641’, British Catholic History xxxiii (2017), 365–9Google Scholar.

151 Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 156.

152 Dowdall to Burghley, 9 Mar. 1596, SP 63/187/19.

153 Jefferies, Irish Church, 256–8.

154 Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, 94.

155 Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 214.

156 John Howlin, ‘Perbreve compendium’, in Spicilegium Ossoriense: being a collection of original letters and papers illustrative of the history of the Irish Church from the Reformation to the year 1800, ed. Patrick F. Moran, Dublin 1874, i. 106–9. Margaret was immortalised in a martyrology soon afterwards, while her son Walter was demonised for persecuting his elderly mother to death: Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 156–7.

157 Jefferies, Irish Church, 263.

158 Colm Lennon, ‘The urban patriciates of early modern Ireland: a case-study of Limerick’ (O'Donnell lecture), Dublin 1999, 16.

159 McShane, ‘Negotiating religious change and conflict’, 370–1.

160 Simone Laqua-O'Donnell, Women and the Counter-Reformation in early modern Münster, Oxford 2014, 72ff. See also Barbara B. Diefendorf, From penitence to charity: pious women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, Oxford 2002, 203–46.

161 Sandra Cavallo, Charity and power in early modern Italy: benefactors and their motives in Turin, 1541–1789, Cambridge 1995, 158.

162 Jefferies, ‘Men, women and religion’, 362–4. English women were routinely charitable to the poor before the Reformation: Crawford, Women and religion, 23–4; Peters, Patterns of piety, 53–9.

163 Gentlemen's Magazine, July 1861, 34, 35; Sept. 1861, 261.

164 See, for example, the will of Dean Alen of Dublin: William Monck Mason, The history and antiquities of the collegiate church and cathedral of St Patrick near Dublin, Dublin 1820, appendix xii, pp xiv–xv.

165 Corish, ‘Women and religious practice’, 214.

166 For examples of traditional female piety expressed through charity see Hall, Women and the Church, 189–90. For the charitable work of female religious communities see p. 175–6. See also McShane, ‘Negotiating religious change’, 370–1.

167 I wish to thank Diarmaid MacCulloch for that insightful observation.

168 Raymond Gillespie, Devoted people: belief and religion in early modern Ireland, Manchester 1997, 30. Robert Persons sj wrote in 1580 of English wives threatening to leave their husbands if they attended Protestant services: Warnicke, Women, 170.

169 Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, 92.

170 Jefferies, Irish Church, 263.

171 Patrick J. Ryan, Archbishop Meiler Magrath: the enigma of Cashel, Roscrea 2014, 106–8. O'Meara was criticised along with her husband in a biting satire by Eoghan Ó Dubhthaigh, a Franciscan friar, but seems not to have suffered the same opprobrium as other clerical wives: pp. 79–80, 106.

172 Thomas Connors, ‘Religion and the laity in early modern Galway’, in Gerard Moran and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Galway: history and society, Dublin 1996, 133.

173 Jefferies, Irish Church, 249.

174 Lennon, Lords of Dublin, 137–8.

175 Elrington, James Ussher, 1–2.

176 Ibid. 1, 5. Suzannah Lipscomb found that such reversions were common in Reformation Languedoc with widows citing the threat of being beaten, or actual beatings, to excuse their apostasy: The voices of Nîmes: women, sex and marriage in Reformation Languedoc, Oxford 2019, 108–12.

177 Elrington, James Ussher, 38.

178 Alan Ford, ‘Shaping history: James Ussher and the Church of Ireland’, and Miriam Moffitt, ‘W. A. Phillips, History of the Church of Ireland (1933–4): a missed opportunity’, in Empey, Ford and Moffitt, Church of Ireland, 21–6, 182–3.

179 Dickens, ‘Recusancy in Yorkshire’, 39–40; Bossy, English Catholic community, 150–68; Aveling, ‘Catholic households in Yorkshire’, 88; Rowlands, ‘Recusant women’, 153–77, and English Catholics, 139–42; Walsham, Church papists, 78–83.

180 Bossy, English Catholic community, 157–8.

181 Walsham, Church papists, 80–1.

182 Bossy, English Catholic community, 157–8.

183 Davis, Society and culture, 88; Eamon Duffy, ‘Holy maydens, holy wyfes: the cult of women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Webb (eds), Women in the Church (Studies in Church History xxvii, 1990), 175–96.

184 Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Theory in the absence of fact’, 142; Davis, Society and culture, 88; Duffy, ‘Holy maydens’, 196.

185 Lyndal Roper, The holy household: women and morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford 1991 edn, 262. See too Diana M. Webb, ‘Woman and home: the domestic setting of late medieval spirituality’, in Sheils and Webb, Women in the Church, 159–73.

186 Brady, State papers, no. xxv; Jefferies, Irish Church, 194–5.

187 Davis, Society and culture, 96; Menna Prestwich, International Calvinism, 1541–1715, Oxford 1985, 96; Lipscombe, Voices of Nîmes, 107–18.

188 Lennon, ‘Mass in the manor house’, 112–26; Diane Willen, ‘Women and religion in early modern England’, in Marshall, Women, 150–8.

189 SP 63/10/42; Jefferies, Irish Church, 134, 140–1; Scott, Religion and Reformation in Meath, 56–7.

190 Warnicke, Women, 170–1.

191 Willen, ‘Women and religion’, 154–5.

192 Fynes Morison's Itinerary, 92.

193 Ibid.

194 Ibid. 150–1.

195 Lipscombe, Voices of Nîmes, 179.

196 Ibid. 108.

197 The fact that Catholic and magisterial Protestant reformers agreed that the role of women ought to conform to the prescriptions of the Judeo-Christian Bible, a collection of religious texts composed between 1,400 to 2,000 years earlier, was bound to have reactionary implications for gender roles. Joan Kelly argued that the contemporary humanist focus on classical culture, ‘with all its patriarchal and misogynous bias’, tended in the same direction: Women, history and theory: the essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago–London 1984, 35–6.