Irish Leaving Certificate History

Ireland under the early Tudors

At the end of the fifteenth century the English crown held direct power in only a small part of Ireland. The Pale, the districts of Dublin, Louth, Meath and Kildare, was the area where English law and government worked, and even there the king's officers depended on the goodwill of local lords. Outside it lay Gaelic lordships that followed their own law and customs, and the great Anglo-Irish families (the Old English), who ruled large territories almost as independent princes. Henry VII (1485-1509) and Henry VIII (1509-1547) both wanted Ireland to be orderly and cheap to govern, and for most of the period they tried to do this by working through the greatest local family, the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare.

The Kildare hegemony

The 8th Earl of Kildare, Gerald FitzGerald, called Garret Mór (the Great Earl), was Lord Deputy for most of the years between 1477 and his death in 1513. The Lord Deputy was the king's representative in Ireland, and Kildare used the office to build up his own power. His estates, his armed followers and his marriage alliances with Gaelic lords (he married his daughters into Gaelic ruling families) let him keep a rough order that the crown could not have afforded to impose from England. In return the crown tolerated an overmighty subject. The weakness of the arrangement was that Kildare's loyalty could never be taken for granted. In 1487 he supported the pretender Lambert Simnel, who was crowned in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, and later he was linked with another pretender, Perkin Warbeck.

His main rivals were the Butlers, Earls of Ormond, whose lands lay in Kilkenny and Tipperary. The feud between the two houses ran through the whole period and affected which of them held the deputyship and so who benefited from the crown's favour.

Poynings' Law, 1494-1495

In 1494 Henry VII sent Sir Edward Poynings to Ireland as Lord Deputy, with troops, to replace Kildare. A parliament met at Drogheda in 1494-1495, and its acts are called Poynings' Law. Two rules mattered most. An Irish parliament could meet only with the licence of the king and his council, and any bill it was to consider had first to be approved by them. The aim was to stop the Irish parliament being used for rebellion, as it had been in the Simnel affair, and to keep it under English control. The law stayed in force for nearly three centuries, until the Irish parliament won legislative independence in 1782. Poynings could not afford a long campaign and left after about two years. Kildare was restored to the deputyship in 1496, and the crown went back to ruling through him.

The 9th Earl and the fall of the Geraldines

Gerald Óg FitzGerald, the 9th Earl, succeeded in 1513 and held the deputyship for most of the next two decades, with interruptions caused by his rivals' influence at court. By the early 1530s Henry VIII's advisers, especially Thomas Cromwell, wanted firmer government in Ireland, partly because the break with Rome (1530s) made it more dangerous to leave a powerful family in charge. In 1534 the earl was summoned to London, and he left his son Thomas, Lord Offaly, known as Silken Thomas, in charge in Dublin.

A rumour spread that the earl had been executed. In June 1534 Thomas went to St Mary's Abbey in Dublin, where the council was meeting, and publicly renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. His followers besieged Dublin Castle and murdered Archbishop John Alen of Dublin in July 1534. The 9th Earl died in the Tower of London that year, before he could be tried.

Henry sent Sir William Skeffington as Lord Deputy, with cannon and a large force. He took Maynooth Castle, the Kildare stronghold, in March 1535, using heavy artillery, which Irish castles were not built to resist. Most of the garrison were executed, an event remembered ironically as the pardon of Maynooth. Silken Thomas surrendered in August 1535, and was executed at Tyburn in London in February 1537 with five of his uncles. The Kildare lands were forfeited and a young half-brother, Gerald, was smuggled abroad, which kept alive a hope of restoration. The Fitzgeralds did return to the peerage later, in the 1550s, but the great hegemony was over, and the crown now had to govern Ireland more directly.

From Poynings to Skeffington as a pattern of reform

Looking at the years 1494-1534 as a whole, Tudor policy in Ireland was repeatedly pulled between two courses. One was to rule cheaply through a great magnate, as with Kildare. The other was to send an English deputy with troops, as with Poynings, the Earl of Surrey (1520-1522, who reported that real reform would need a full conquest) and Skeffington. The second was costly and short-lived each time. The 1534 rebellion settled the question in favour of direct control, because it removed the family that made the first course possible.

Lord Leonard Grey and the Geraldine League

Lord Leonard Grey was Lord Deputy from 1536 to 1540. He was a soldier and set out to extend English authority beyond the Pale, with expeditions into Munster, Ulster and the midlands. His actions provoked a defensive alliance of Gaelic and Old English lords, the Geraldine League, formed to restore the Kildare heir and to resist the crown. Its leading organiser was Manus O'Donnell, Lord of Tír Chonaill, and the Kildare heir's aunt, Eleanor Fitzgerald, who was married to O'Donnell, helped bring it together on behalf of her nephew. Grey defeated the League at Bellahoe in County Monaghan in 1539. He was recalled in 1540 and executed for treason in 1541, partly because he had favoured his friends in the Irish administration and quarrelled with the council.

The Parliament of 1541 and surrender and regrant

Sir Anthony St Leger, Lord Deputy from 1540 to 1548 (and again in the 1550s), replaced conquest by a policy of conciliation, and it was the most original part of Tudor policy in these years. The Irish parliament of 1541 declared Henry VIII King of Ireland, instead of Lord of Ireland, the title English monarchs had held since the Middle Ages. The change was meant to give the crown a direct claim on the loyalty of everyone in the island, Gaelic lords included, rather than treating the Gaelic lordships as outside the kingdom. For the first time in living memory Gaelic lords sat in parliament alongside the Old English.

The means of binding lords to the crown was surrender and regrant. A Gaelic lord surrendered his land to the king and received it back under English law, with an English title such as earl or baron. He promised loyalty, to use English law and customs, and to provide military service. In return his ownership was secure, and he was now a subject with the legal status that political reformers called citizenship, meaning the rights of the king's English subjects. Con Bacach O'Neill became Earl of Tyrone in 1542, Murrough O'Brien Earl of Thomond in 1543 and Ulick Burke Earl of Clanricard in 1543.

The policy had a hidden weakness. English law passed land to the eldest son (primogeniture), while Gaelic custom chose a successor from among the ruling family's eligible men (tanistry). Surrender and regrant therefore changed who would inherit, and it created rivals. Con Bacach intended his title to pass to Matthew, Baron of Dungannon, and his son Shane O'Neill, who regarded himself as the rightful heir, refused to accept it. Sir Thomas Cusack, an Old English lawyer who became Lord Chancellor, was one of the officials who advised the crown on how reform could proceed in the middle of the century.

The mid-Tudor regimes and the beginnings of plantation

Under Edward VI (1547-1553) the government built forts in the territories of the O'Moores and O'Connors in Laois and Offaly on the Pale's western border, Fort Protector and Fort Governor, as a first step in controlling land that raiders crossed into the Pale. Under Mary I (1553-1558) the policy went further. The 3rd Earl of Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, was Lord Deputy from 1556, and in his time an act of parliament confiscated the lands of the O'Moores and O'Connors and shired them as Queen's County and King's County. The forts became towns named for the monarchs: Maryborough (now Portlaoise) for Queen Mary and Philipstown for her husband, Philip of Spain.

The plantation of Laois and Offaly

This was the crown's first sustained attempt to settle English colonists on land taken from Gaelic owners. The settlers were mainly English soldiers and officers, who were given land at rents and with the duty of defending it. It was a reaction to a security problem, the raiding that came into the Pale, rather than a design to change Irish society. Some of the original owners were allowed to stay as tenants, so the plantation was less thorough than the Ulster plantation half a century later.

It did not hold peacefully. The O'Moores and O'Connors kept up a guerrilla war to recover their land, and the settlers lived under constant threat. In 1578 an event at Mullaghmast, in County Kildare, entered Irish memory: members of the O'More and other families were invited to a meeting and were killed by soldiers and settlers, during the Elizabethan government's campaign against the resistance led by Rory Óg O'More, who was killed that year. The plantation matters for historians as the first experiment in a method that was used again in Munster, Ulster and elsewhere, and for the lesson it taught the crown about cost and security. It also showed the Gaelic Irish that the crown was willing to take their land by force, which hardened resistance in the years after.

Key personalities

The 8th and 9th Earls of Kildare represent the older way of governing Ireland through a great family. Con Bacach O'Neill and Manus O'Donnell show how Gaelic lords reacted to the crown, one by accepting reform and the other by resisting then submitting. Eleanor Fitzgerald shows the political weight a woman of a great family could carry in the Geraldine League. Sir Anthony St Leger and Sir Thomas Cusack were the officials most associated with the reform policy, and the 3rd Earl of Sussex with plantation.