CHAPTER 5

 

Religious Conflict and Irish Emigration

 

 

From where did I receive so great and beneficent a gift

– to known and desire God,

relinquishing homeland and family for Him?

 

– St. Patrick's Declaration, 5th Century A.D.

 

 

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION IN EUROPE AND IRELAND

 

      Although Celtic culture was gradually transformed into Irish culture during the two centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, religion remained a central element in the new society.  Gradually, the Irish shifted away from the practices and doctrines that were uniquely Celtic, conforming outwardly to the Roman Christian faith followed in most of Europe.  Because "White Martyr" fervour faded as a motive for migration to Europe, the number of Irish monks emigrating to Europe decreased.  As a result, some of the monasteries founded by the Irish had to be abandoned, while others were taken over by continental religious orders.  By the 15th and early 16th centuries, Irish émigrés rarely settled in Europe for religious reasons.  Instead, they were seeking economic opportunities and safety from English tyranny after failed rebellions.  But during the Protestant Reformation, a new conflict arose that would make religion a pivotal factor in motivating emigration and shaping the Irish influence on Europe.

      Christianity as defined by the Roman Catholic Church had been a stabilizing element for European civilization during the late medieval period.  The name Catholic meant universal, and indeed the religion was found everywhere in western and central Europe.  By the beginning of the 16th century, the Catholic clergy had grown widely corrupt as many priests, bishops and even some of the Popes sought wealth and personal power.  For many people, the Catholic Church came to represent empty ritual that did not adequately address their spiritual needs.

      In the last centuries of the medieval period, any individual suggesting reform was swiftly condemned as a heretic by the Catholic hierarchy.  But in 1517, a German named Martin Luther openly challenged the Catholic Church, and garnered enough support from kings and princes to make himself immune from physical reprisal.  His protest against Catholic religious abuses swelled into the movement called Protestantism that spread with astonishing speed.  Jean Calvin in France and Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland, following Luther's lead, defined new forms of Christian belief that not only condemned Catholic corruption but also challenged the validity of its dogma.  Within the span of a few decades, the refusal of Catholics and Protestants to compromise on the issue of doctrine created a religious fissure that snaked across Christian Europe.

      Because force had been usually used to quell religious dissension during the late medieval period, both Protestants and Catholics believed that oppression was the best solution for religious controversy.  Civil unrest plagued kingdoms and embryonic nations because of religious differences.  Public executions called "acts of faith" occurred in both Protestant and Catholic lands.  By the end of the 16th century, the allegiance of each nation to the Protestant or Catholic religion became firmly established, despite continuing Catholic efforts to suppress rival doctrines and the efforts of the various Protestant denominations to spread the reformed creed.  France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria and the Flemish Lowlands remained Catholic, while Germany, England, Scandinavia and the Netherlands became Protestant.  These religious loyalties would guide the development of international alliances and conflicts over the next few centuries.

      The religious strife that plagued Europe upset the traditional religious tolerance in Ireland by initiating a conflict between Protestant and Catholic that has endured until the present day.  In 1534, Henry VIII of England broke away from the Pope to form his own religion and the London Parliament recognized him as "the only Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England".  This also included his dominions in Ireland.  His new religion came to be called Anglican, and Henry ensured that it differed little from traditional Catholic doctrine and ritual.  Initially, points of major variation were the rejection of the authority of the Pope and the affirmation of the right of the English king to appoint bishops.  But Henry himself had not counted on the depth of desire for religious reformation among his people.  The excesses of the Catholic clergy had predisposed the English for changes far more sweeping than Henry envisioned.  During the course of the 16th century, there grew among the Anglicans a militant minority who sought to "purify" the new religion by forbidding statues, icons, vestments and any other external trappings associated with the Catholic Church.  These Anglicans, who were fanatically anti-Catholic, eventually became known as Puritans and would play a major role in persecuting Irish Catholics and thereby stimulating Irish emigration to Europe.

      In 1536, Henry VIII convened a Parliament in Dublin to help him reach his goal of being recognized as the head of Church and State in Ireland as well as England.  At the time, Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, was leading a rebellion against England, which has come to be known as the Geraldine Revolt.  This Revolt not only brought into question England's hold on Ireland, but it also strengthened anti-English sentiment among the Irish nobility.  Henry wanted to be sure that this Parliament would readily grant him official recognition as head of Church and State.  So he was very selective about who was invited to attend.  Irish nobles whose loyalty was in doubt were excluded, as were the clerical and monastic representatives who normally attended whenever a Dublin Parliament was convened.  As Henry planned, the 1536 Parliament readily recognized him as the head of the new Church he had formed.  The Parliament went on to declare that the Catholic religion was null and void, "corrupt for ever".  After this action of the Parliament, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, a man named St. Leger whom Henry had appointed to govern Ireland, demanded that all Irish lords immediately acknowledge Henry as being both head of Church and State.  The "saint" in St. Leger was a family name and not a religious title.  His demand extended to the Irish lords who were entitled to attend the Dublin Parliament and who had been excluded by Henry as well as to all the Irish lords who were in attendance at the Parliament.  Any lord refusing to meet the demand would be accused of treason, and his title and his land would be taken from him.  He even risked execution.

      By the mid-16th century, the agents and allies of the English crown were vigorously enforcing the laws that the English government had enacted against the Catholic religion in Ireland.  When the Anglicans began to destroy holy relics and shrines throughout Ireland, in isolated hamlets as well as cities, and assault and sometimes murder priests for saying Mass, the Catholics of Ireland began to resist.  The laws passed to make the Anglican Church the only authorized religion stemming from Henry VIII's 1536 Parliament and the ensuing violence against Catholics were the beginning of the centuries of continual religious strife that plagued Ireland.  At this time, the laws and persecution prompted a new wave of Irish emigrants to set out for European countries where they could practise their Catholic religion openly and escape the heightening of English oppression in their homeland.

 

     

IRISH RELIGIOUS REFUGEES

 

      The first in this new wave of Irish émigrés were members of the Catholic clergy.  They left Ireland for the Catholic countries of Europe where they could continue to pursue their religious vocation openly.  They went mostly to Spain, France and Italy.  Monarchs and nobles in these countries readily granted them permission to settle in their lands to preach, conduct religious ceremonies and engage in other spiritual work.  Some of the clergy went to Rome seeking spiritual support and financial aid to try to preserve Catholicism in Ireland.  Since the Popes and Catholic hierarchy were mounting a "counter-reformation" to try to regain the pre-eminence and the influence the Catholic Church had lost in the Protestant Reformation, the Popes welcomed the spiritual fervour and the plans of the Irish clergy.  The Popes elevated many of the Irish priests to the rank of bishop and funded their return to Ireland so that they could clandestinely help to keep the Catholic religion alive.  While the Popes saw the Irish as valuable agents for their counter-reformation and for saving Catholicism in Ireland, at the same time they saw the Irish as too unsophisticated to be given positions in the politically and diplomatically complex world of the European societies or in the Papal curia overseeing the activities of the counter-reformation.

      A second group of religious immigrants from Ireland were the young men who wanted to study for the priesthood.  With the closing of most of the monasteries and the schools associated with them by the Protestants of England, the opportunity to study Catholic theology and ritual in Ireland abruptly became limited.  Many Irish students flocked to the seminaries attached to the universities in Madrid, Paris and Rome.  When the number of Irish seminarians at a particular university grew large enough, they established their own colleges at the university which became known as "Irish Colleges" and could be found in more than two dozen major European cities.  Some of the graduates returned to Ireland to perform Catholic mass and administer the sacraments in secret, but most of them remained in continental Europe shaping the direction of the Catholic counter-reformation at local levels.

      Once they arrived in the Catholic lands of Europe, the Irish émigrés enjoyed a relatively high status as religious refugees.  By fleeing Ireland rather than submitting to English Protestant overlords, they had demonstrated their devotion to the Catholic faith.  This higher social standing was granted even to those émigrés who left Ireland to find fortune or adventure and who did not consider themselves religious refugees.  The willingness of Catholic Europeans to accept the Irish into their society because of common religion enabled the émigrés to quickly move into positions of power in government, education and the military.

      A new missionary ethic began to grow among the émigré Irish priests, monks and seminarians, increasing their desire to influence the religious ideas of European society.  They started to view themselves as the spearhead of a drive to eradicate Protestantism not only in Ireland but in all corners of the world.  Many joined the newly-formed Catholic order of the Society of Jesus, popularly called the Jesuits.  At the Council of Trent in 1551, Pope Julius III encouraged the expansion of the Jesuit order and gave it the task of stemming the tide of Protestantism through logical argument and, if necessary, political intrigue.  The Jesuits saw themselves as soldiers willing to die for their cause and would often preach in Protestant lands despite the risk of imprisonment or execution.  The Irish Jesuits often perceived themselves as heroic yet practical spiritual warriors in the tradition of the medieval Celtic monks.

      The same missionary zeal also affected the Irish clergy who remained in continental Europe as parish priests.  They were a constant grassroots force resisting the spread of Protestant doctrine.  Yet very few of them advanced to the position of bishop or cardinal.

      As religious oppression continued in Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries, it tyrannized not only the clergy, but all Catholics.  The rebellion of the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640's and the Williamite War in the 1690's are instances of the various conflicts, ranging from sporadic spontaneous rebellions to full-scale wars, arising from religious differences in Ireland in the centuries after the 1536 Dublin Parliament.  The laws passed by subsequent Parliaments were the most onerous and unjust that Ireland had seen.  For example, a series of laws made ownership of land at first difficult for Catholics and later outlawed land ownership completely.  Following the clergy and nuns who were the first group to be affected by the anti-Catholic laws were Irish merchants, scholars and farmers seeking opportunities denied to them in Ireland.  The laws had the effect not only of preventing the practice of Catholicism in general, but also of interfering with and often preventing Catholics from pursuing many enterprises, interests and trades in Irish society.

      Another sizeable group of Irish émigrés during these centuries was Irish soldiers.  After the inevitable failure of the recurring rebellions and wars of this period when faced with superior English forces, many of the defeated Irish soldiers would flee to different countries of Europe rather than accept English rule.  In some cases, such as the Irish defenders of Limerick during the Williamite War, large numbers of Irish soldiers who had surrendered were given the choice of exile or an oath of allegiance to the English crown.  Most of the soldiers, sometimes en masse in their entire surviving military unit, chose exile.  In most cases, the soldiers went to a European country such as France or Spain which was a traditional enemy of England; or they made their way to such a country from a Protestant nation in Europe to which they had been exiled by England.  The exiled Irish soldiers would then join the army of the enemy of England to continue their resistance against the oppressive English rule of Ireland from foreign soil.

      By the 17th and 18th centuries, the majority of Irish émigrés were no longer members of the Catholic clergy or religious orders of monks or nuns.  The émigrés belonged to various fields common to European society in the early modern era.  They left Ireland not only because they could not freely pursue these activities due to oppressive English rule, but also because they could not freely practise their Catholic faith, which they regarded as an integral part of their Irish culture.  Irish resistance to English rule arose from social, cultural, and religious grievances which were intermixed and could not easily be separated from one another.  Although these later émigrés became involved in areas that were different from those of the medieval monks desiring to be White Martyrs, and different from the priests, monks and nuns fleeing English oppression in the 1600's, they nonetheless left Ireland partly for religious reasons.  This religious motive which was a factor of varying proportions for all Irish émigrés well into the modern age - whether monks or merchants or soldiers or scholars - in a way bound the émigrés over several centuries to one another.  It was the religious factor which more than any other determined which countries in Europe the large majority would go to; the relationships they would make with monarchs, nobles and others in these countries; and the ties they would keep among themselves.

 

 

IRISH STEREOTYPES

 

      The increased commercial, diplomatic and educational opportunities of the Renaissance led to an increase in travel to foreign countries.  In many cases, learned travellers to foreign countries would publish books about their experiences and observations for their countrymen after their returns to their homelands.  These books often revealed more about the biases of the authors than the countries they had visited.  Even such a learned individual as Erasmus of the Netherlands was not free from this penchant.  After his travels to different European countries, he wrote that Germans were crude, French were violent and Italians were vain and devious.  These travel books of the Renaissance led to unflattering stereotypes of different nationalities.

      The stereotype which clung to the Irish was that they were devoutly religious, but unsophisticated.  They were often regarded as simplistic and somewhat superstitious in their understanding of the doctrines and beliefs of Catholicism.  Because the Irish came from an agricultural society, the populations of Madrid, Paris and other Renaissance cities which were becoming increasingly complex did not feel that the Irish had the sense of refinement regarding religion - or other aspects of culture - as they had.  This view of the Irish was especially strong in Rome.  But this somewhat denigrating opinion of the Irish did not prevent them from becoming influential, and often leaders, in politics, military affairs, commerce, education and other fields.

      By the time of the Renaissance, when the ethnic and national stereotypes were forming, Irish émigrés were familiar figures to most Europeans from the folklore which had grown up around the monks of the Middle Ages.  This folklore tended to counter the denigrating stereotype of the Irish.  In the folk literature of many parts of western and central Europe, the monks were depicted as larger than life, and sometimes as miraculous figures who had gained the affection of local societies and made important contributions to them.  The later émigrés did have a resemblance to the medieval monks in major respects.  Like the medieval monks, the Irish émigrés during the Renaissance were fervently religious, well-educated, and willing to impart their knowledge and teach their skills to the people around them.  They lived by a code of ethics which allowed no compromise with honour, whether related to their religious beliefs or their service to an adopted country or monarch.