The Dioceses of the Church of Ireland
The Church of Ireland came into existence in 1536 when the Irish Parliament declared Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church on earth (i.e. Head of the Church of Ireland), although he would not legally become King of Ireland until 1541. Henry’s assumption of the title of King of Ireland had great ecclesiopolitical significance since the title Lord of Ireland implied a tacit acceptance of the Pope’s claim, (apparently) first made by Hadrian IV in the Bull Laudabiliter of 1155, that Ireland was a Papal fief. Hadrian granted Henry II the Lordship of Ireland. Thus Henry’s assumption of the title of King had less to do with dispossessing the native Irish kings than with confronting the Pope.
Although he accepted the Royal Supremacy, George Cromer the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland was not excommunicated and deprived of his see by the Pope until 1539. The Pope’s appointment of Robert Wauchope to Armagh in the same year marked the beginning of the rival Archbishoprics, a situation briefly resolved in 1553 with the re-appointment of George Dowdall as Primate. After Dowdall’s death the see was vacant until the Pope appointed a successor in 1560 (an Irishman, Donat O’Teige) and Queen Elizabeth appointed Adam Loftus in 1562. The Papacy did not create parallel hierarchies in England or Scotland and it was presumably because the Pope considered Ireland a Papal territory, where the Queen had no right to approve the appointments of bishops, that he did so in Ireland. Paul IV had recognised Phillip and Mary as King and Queen of Ireland in 1555 but the Papacy’s later actions demonstrated that Elizabeth was thought to have forfeited the title.
The most significant event for the Church of Ireland during Elizabeth’s reign was the establishment of Trinity College, Dublin for the training of clergy, although the vast majority of these were not Irishmen but English. An exception was John Garvey, Primate 1589-95, who came from County Kilkenny.
In 1615 the Convocation of the Church of Ireland adopted 104 articles known as the Irish Articles. Although these articles superficially resemble the 39 Articles of the Church of England they are in fact a great deal more detailed and much less ambiguous on many matters; they also represent a more thoroughgoing and explicit Calvinism than the 39 Articles. For instance, Article 17 of the English Articles is supplemented considerably in Articles 11-17 of the Irish Articles, which insist upon a fixed and certain number of Predestined and Reprobated persons. Whereas Article 17 of the English Articles carefully cautions against an overemphasis on the teaching of reprobation since it may drive people to despair, the Irish Articles merely state, ‘to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s predestination is very dangerous’. The Irish Articles were largely the work of the Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, James Ussher, who became Primate in 1625. When the Irish Parliament adopted the 39 Articles in 1634 under pressure from the King and Archbishop Laud, Ussher ensured that the Church of Ireland adopted them in addition to, not instead of, the Irish Articles.
Ussher’s Church of Ireland, with its stringently Calvinist theology, largely served the Pale of Settlement and the plantations and it did not succeed in commanding support from the old Hiberno-Norman aristocracy, still less the native Irish. In that sense, it failed as a national church and was seen by the Irish as an instrument of English occupation. The first person to attempt to reverse this was William Bedell, who was appointed Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh in 1629 and is celebrated for translating the Old Testament into Irish in an effort to reach out to and convert the native population.
In spite of Bedell’s efforts, the Irish rising of 1641 and the native backlash against the plantations solidified the alienation of the Church of Ireland from the Irish people, and the exaggerated accounts of Catholic atrocities committed in that year pass as fact even today. Ussher opposed Ormonde’s alliance with the Confederacy of Kilkenny and was equally respected by Parliamentarians and Royalist Protestants, although himself a determined Royalist and episcopalian.
William Bedell’s work bore some fruit, however, in the conversion of the family of O’Sioridain who anglicised their name to Sheridan. In 1641 there was a concerted effort by the Confederates to install the Catholic clergy in the houses, churches and cathedrals then occupied by the clergy of the Church of Ireland (an action to be repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, in 1689). Although Bedell was loved by the Irish he was ejected from his palace and was sheltered by Sheridan, who went unmolested – a sign that the Confederates’ cause was not entirely a religious one, but was resistance to the English occupation of Ireland.
The destruction of numerous Irish cathedrals by Cromwell was a direct result of their having been occupied by the Catholic bishops – and Cromwell, being a Presbyterian, saw no reason for them to be preserved as properties of the Church of Ireland, which was suppressed and replaced with Presbyterian church government, as in England. Again, as in England, Presbyterian ministers were dispossessed at the Restoration and the polity of the Church of Ireland was restored, but Ireland was a very different place in 1660 from what it had been in 1641, and the English Protestant ascendancy was irrevocably alienated from the Irish people.
Dennis Sheridan, the protegé of William Bedell the founder of ‘Gaelic Protestantism’, had two sons who became Bishops of the Church of Ireland. Patrick Sheridan was Bishop of Cloyne from 1679-82, while Dennis’s youngest son William became Bishop of Bedell’s old see, Kilmore, in 1681.
On 12th March 1689 James II landed at Kinsale in order to secure the Kingdom of Ireland, in which he was supported by Irish Catholics. Some repossession by Catholics of Church of Ireland property occurred at this time – Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin was given over to Catholic worship and Alexius Stafford was appointed Dean. It is perhaps understandable, therefore, that the bishops of the Church of Ireland were hostile to James’ regime since they did not receive the same consideration as their English counterparts. On James’ defeat in 1691, all of the Irish bishops swore the oaths to William of Orange, with the exception of William Sheridan, Bishop of Kilmore, the only Irish Non-Juror. Sheridan was removed from his see and died in 1711. With him, the Royalist Church of Ireland died too as he made no provision for the ordination of successors; there was no Non-Juring Church of Ireland in parallel to the Hanoverian church.
After 1691 the Church of Ireland was the resort of English and Irish Protestants who could not manage to find preferment in the Church of England – an increasingly moribund church with little or no relevance to the Irish people, which collected and spent tithes paid by a population to whom it meant nothing. In 1801 the Church of Ireland disappeared altogether when it was absorbed into the Church of England in the same way that Ireland was absorbed into the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the Church of Ireland underwent a kind of resurrection in 1871 when it was disestablished; Episcopalian Irish Protestants were forced to find a new identity, and to do so they turned to the ancient Irish church and many were drawn to the nationalist cause – but those events lie outside the scope of my title.
