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

Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII: the making of Tudor political theology, 1515-47 James Leduc Vol. 1 of 2 The University of Dublin, Trinity College The School of Histories and Humanities The Department of History Supervisor: Professor Jane Ohlmeyer Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy (2021) i Declaration I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and it is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement. (James Leduc) ii Summary A fragmented land of lordships and crown territories, by the reign of Henry VIII (1509- 47), Ireland was a renewed site of English intervention as the Tudor regime sought to impose its authority across the island. Yet, while historians recognise Henry VIII’s reign as a watershed in Irish history, most see the king’s break with Rome (1534-6) and the beginning of the Reformation as an act of legal schism with little to no immediate theological impact. When viewed through the lens of political theology, however, the ramifications of royal claims to sovereignty over church and kingdom become clearer and new avenues for thinking about order, power, and governance in Ireland appear. Exploring the making of Tudor political theology against North Atlantic and Eurasian worlds, 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 life in Ireland. Tudor political theology had a set of imperatives – allegiance, obedience, ‘civility’, conformity, and service – that, as indices of moral governance, embodied specific arrangements between God, prince, and subject. Forming a constellation of standards through which order, governance, and power were convulsed and transformed across the tumultuous final decades of Henrician rule in Ireland, they were the crux of volatile struggles to define and assert ‘true’ Christian order and sovereignty. Tudor forms of life and service, then, contended with others whose obligations of allegiance were centred on rival sovereigns – namely, the pope, the Habsburg emperor, Irish lords, and the French and Scottish kings. In such volatile yet porous terrains of spiritual-civil power and law, and anchored in a distinctly post-Reformation Henrician Christianity that idiosyncratically harnessed Europe’s theological landscapes, a new conception of ‘true Christian crown subject-hood and service’ appeared, one that, as the linchpin of Tudor political theology and the fount for a novel form of ‘religion’, was enacted and appropriated, consolidated and subverted, by English, English-Irish, and Irish alike in the interstices of diverse paradigms of (dis)order across ‘Gaelic’ and ‘English’ worlds. With the turmoil of the 1530s–40s convulsing the tenets of divine and civil order, a distinctly Reformation political theology of ‘truth’ rooted in Henrician theocratic and sacramental kingship and crown subject-hood crystallized. What it meant to obey God and king, what ‘civility’ and ‘conformity’ connoted, and how these aligned iii with ‘true crown service’ changed as aristocratic revolt and the Reformation galvanized growing instability across Ireland. As the regime enforced the Reformation, crown officials came to obsess over the ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’ of the king’s English-Irish and Irish subjects, and their service and submissions to the crown, a development further driven by how the political theologies of the inter-faith representation of Christians, Jews, and Muslims galvanized the terms and exigences of Tudor sovereignty and ‘reform’. Consequently, gradations of perfection by which crown officials distinguished between degrees of obedience, conformity, and ‘civility’ gradually crystalized in Tudor discourse, turning the age-old moral concern with how one’s inner thoughts aligned with outward conduct into a distinctly Reformation problem of colonial order and an index of new forms of sacramental kingship and crown subject-hood. Meanwhile, as the threat of foreign intrigue and invasion loomed and the rhetoric of princely rule was weaponised in the factional rivalries that plagued Irish government, debates over what ‘true’ monarchical and vice-royal order should look like raged. At the heart of the problem lay the fundamental instability of the vice-royal office in Ireland. A revitalised form of ‘government by reward and punishment’ consequently took shape, whereby the demands of rewarding good service and punishing transgressions led to explicit appeals to the prince’s sovereign gaze that mimicked God’s omniscience and the unveiling of one’s ‘truth’ in the confessional. In this volatile environment, counsel became a wedge for alternative Tudor and papal allegiances just as charges of treason proliferated, the perceived usurpation of princely imperium within Gaelic and colonial Ireland acquired a new urgency, and the status of the ‘sacred’ became violently contested. With ‘reform’ now a question of parsing ‘true religion’ from ‘idolatry’, and with the terms of Tudor political theology increasingly polarised around the poles of good and evil just as oaths became both instruments to enforce conformity and vectors for rival allegiances centred on England, Scotland, France, Spain, or Rome, the ‘true Christian crown subject’ emerged in stark opposition to the new bane of Tudor sovereignty, most emphatically embodied in the figures of the friars and the Geraldine: the ‘devilish’, ‘idolatrous’, ‘deceitful’, ‘papistical traitor’. ‘Religion’, far from having remained unmarked by the break with Rome, was thus profoundly altered in the tumultuous final decades of Henry VIII’s reign. For what gradually emerged was not ‘Catholicism without the pope’ but an Anglo-Irish variant of post-Reformation Henrician Christianity. iv Table of contents Acknowledgements Notes and conventions Abbreviations Glossary Introduction: Tudor political theology and Christian forms of life in the age of Reformations 1 i: Reformation in Ireland ii: Political theology, government, and sovereignty iii: ‘Self-care’ and Christian forms of life and service iv: The political-theological paradigm of mediation and delegation of majesty v: Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII: a historiographical overview vi: Sources and chapters Part I: Structures Chapter 1: Imperium and the royal supremacy 38 1.1: The contested histories of World and Spirit 1.2: Imperium and the Henrician doctrine of obedience: a fount for a new Tudor Christian polity and form of life 1.3: Conclusion Chapter 2: Providence, government, and the commonweal: the political theology of moral governance 78 2.1: World, Being, and ‘self’ 2.2: Governance, imperium, and dominion: the corporate Crown and the commanding of Tudor rule 2.3: The reign of providence 2.4: ‘Reform’ and the common weal 2.5: Conclusion Chapter 3: Imperium and the political theology of difference: the Tudor discourse of ‘civility’ 114 3.1: Constitutional anomalies and the Tudor ‘imperial crown’ 3.2: The political theology of colonial difference and the metaphysics of becoming: Giraldus Cambrensis between Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds 3.3: The Tudor discourse of ‘civility’ I: Henry VIII and the Earl of Surrey, 1520-1 3.4: The Tudor discourse of ‘civility’ II: the metaphysics of becoming and the anomalous moral subjects of Tudor political theology 3.5: Conclusion v Chapter 4: The serviceable Christian crown subject and Henrician vitae activae 163 4.1: The political theology of office 4.2: Office and ‘civility’ 4.3: Order and the rhetoric of counsel 4.4: A paragon of serviceable crown subject-hood: the Butlers, 1528-38 4.5: Conclusion Interlude: Edward Walshe, Walter Cowley, and the vitae activae of Henrician political theology, 1545-6 197 vi Acknowledgements Over the course of my doctoral studies, many have contributed to making this thesis what it has become. I entered the Ph.D. program at Trinity College with a project in mind: this current thesis was not it. Seeking to further my MA research into the life, thought, and times of an Elizabethan cleric in Ireland, following my first year-end review, however, Prof. Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr. Robert Armstrong expressed concerns that the topic I had outlined perhaps lacked the source-base that would have allowed me to fully engage the historical questions and problems I was bent on elucidating, and proposed I consider expanding the scope of my research beyond the life of a single cleric. Their suggestions proved decisive, and subsequent discussions with Prof. Colm Lennon, Dr. Mark Hutchinson, Prof. Thomas O’Connor, Dr. James Murray, Prof. John Walter, and Dr. David Edwards on everything from dissertation writing, reading priorities, and publication advice to, on the one hand, thoughtful suggestions about how I could feasibly explore my themes and questions of interest and, on the other, astute insights into the major themes and contexts I endeavoured to study, set me down the path that would culminate in this current study on Henrician political theology. Still at this point expecting to write a thesis on the Reformations in Ireland that covered the entire sixteenth century, I began my archival research in my newly-designated starting point: the reign of Henry VIII. What I discovered overhauled my plans and my expectations – and Prof. Micheál Ó Siocrú’s comments helped refine and seal the scope of my project. What was initially supposed to be a single chapter on the Henrician years blossomed into an entire thesis – and, if I could do it all over again, I would not have it any other way. I want to thank the library staff and archivists at Trinity College Dublin, the British Library, and Lambeth Palace Library without whom I would not have been able to complete this project. Historians and friends from my past years as an undergraduate and MA student in Montréal have also left their indelible mark on my thinking and writing; their combined impact is apparent across all pages of this study: Prof.

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