Ireland in the Reign of Henry VIII: The Making of Tudor Political Theology, 1515-47

Abstract

The reign of Henry VIII was a watershed in Irish history. Historians, however, have underestimated the impact of the Henrician Reformation. Exploring the making of Tudor political theology against the North Atlantic and Eurasian arenas of inter-imperial, dynastic, and spiritual intrigue and strife in which struggle for sovereignty in Ireland unfolded, this thesis argues that the break with Rome coalesced with the ramifications of the Kildare Rebellion (1534-5) and the Act of Kingly Title (1541) to alter the terms of Christian sovereignty and moral governance in Ireland. As the turmoil of the 1530s-40s convulsed the tenets of divine and civil order, a distinctly Reformation political theology of ‘truth’ rooted in Henrician theocratic and sacramental kingship emerged. The consequences for the terms of Tudor ‘reform’ and Christian crown subject-hood and service were steep. For what obedience to God and king entailed, what ‘civility’, conformity, and ‘sincere’ submissions to the crown connoted, and how these aligned with ‘true crown service’ changed as the perceived usurpation of princely imperium in Ireland – and the related instabilities of the viceroyal office – acquired a new urgency, ongoing international intrigue and factional strife threatened Tudor sovereignty, and the status of the sacred became violently contested. In this volatile environment further plagued by mounting accusations of treason and the proliferation of oaths to secure rival bonds of spiritual and civil allegiance to foreign powers, ‘religion’ in Ireland, encompassing far more than mere devotional life, was not simply ‘Catholicism without the pope’ , but was transformed into a distinctly Anglo-Irish variant of post-Reformation Henrician Christianity.