Reactions to the passage of the Act for the Kingly Title in Dublin and in London revealed that both the Old English community and the crown recognized its implications for the dynamics of Irish politics. On 18 June 1541, a public holiday and a general amnesty for prisoners were proclaimed in Dublin as the Act for the Kingly Title was promulgated at Saint Patrick‘s Cathedral. Two thousand Dubliners celebrated High Mass and Te Deum, and cannonades, bonfires, and free wine marked the transformation of Ireland from a medieval lordship into a sovereign kingdom.(35) The reaction in London differed substantially. "Not a cheer was raised at court,"(36) and the king‘s council handled the Act as matter of routine administration and statutory revision. The passage of the Act infuriated the irascible monarch who acquired the title. Henry VIII condemned it on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds. The Act‘s text, he charged, implied that his kingly title in Ireland proceeded from the election and common consent of the Irish parliament and not from the right of original conquest; the bestowal of the kingly title by the Irish parliament, he argued, would derogate that title which he already held.(37) Henry also understood the Act‘s practical implications. He rebuked his council for devising "by an act, to invest in us the name and title of king of Ireland" when royal revenues were not "sufficient to maintain the state of the same."(38) Nevertheless, Henry could not refuse his new duties. The Old English, it seemed, had succeeded in binding him to protect and to advance their interests. The statutory transformation of Ireland into a pan-insular kingdom, however, did not bring about this unity in practice. The attempt to implement the constitutional framework designed by the Act for the Kingly Title again raised tensions between the Old English desires for vigorous government and the crown‘s impulse to reduce costs. Conciliatory measures designed to bring the Gaelic Irish under English rule showed most clearly the practical short-comings of the new constitutional system. Surrender and re-grant, by which English property laws replaced traditional Gaelic methods of land tenure, provoked substantial Gaelic resentment to the expansion of English jurisdiction.(39) Henry‘s emphasis on economy in government initially kept these tensions to a minimum, but the attempt by the regime of Edward VI to impose a Protestant religious settlement and to deal aggressively with Gaelic Ireland gave rise to open conflict.(40) In Ulster, the imposition of English laws of primogeniture sparked a violent dispute between the sons of Con Bacagh O‘Neill: Shane, who held the right of succession by Gaelic law, and Matthew, the firstborn who acquired this right by primogeniture. The intervention of the Tudor administration to enforce English law and to protect Matthew‘s "legal" inheritance provoked Shane to launch an attack on the Pale. This, indeed, was the typical result of surrender and re-grant; the imposition of English property laws met with limited success only in the Gaelic regions of the western earldoms of Clanricard and Thomond.(41) In the context of increasing unrest, two impulses converged to motivate the crown to revise its strategies of Irish government. First, the rebellions of the O‘Neills in Ulster and of the O‘Connors and the O‘Mores in the midlands led the Dublin administration to focus its resources and energies on the reduction of border threats to the English Pale; colonial officials recognized the tenuous position of an English settlement surrounded by an increasingly hostile Gaelic Irish population.(42) Secondly, the emergence of Irish patronage as a significant prize in court politics motivated leading courtiers to press for a military suppression of and expansion into Ireland. During the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I, these courtiers entrenched themselves in the Dublin administration and shaped an increasingly militant approach to Irish governance.(43) |
