By 1541 Henry, convinced that his ascendancy in Ireland would be advanced more by conciliation than by conquest, replaced Grey with Sir Anthony St. Leger as deputy. However, the conciliation would be on his terms rather than on Irish terms. An instrument used by the king in winning over the Irish chieftains, as well as the "Old English"1 lords, was the availability of land that had been taken from Kildare and other Geraldines still in rebellion. As he did in England, Henry used parliament to ratify his designs. A new Irish parliament met in 1541. In attendance in its House of Lords were representatives from families that had long been absent as well as native Irish lords, who hitherfore would not have been eligible to attend. This parliament acknowledged Henry, and his successors, to be "for evermore Kings of Ireland."
The same parliament passed legislation governing the policy of "Surrender and Regrant," by which a Gaelic lord would acknowledge the king's authority over his territory. In return he would be regranted the territory and awarded a title. This situation would put the Irish lords in the same relationship with the king and his law as the Anglo-Irish lords, with right to his courts and the full protection of his law. It would replicate in Ireland the situation in England whereby all land in theory was the king's, but by which the individual occupier held title in return for fulfilling certain obligations to the king, originally military but increasingly financial. Succession to the land was by primogeniture, that is, to the eldest male as heir.
This system contrasted with the native Irish, or Brehon, law concept that the land belonged to the family, or sept, and succession to it was determined by election from among the near relatives of the incumbent. As so often happens in history, acceptance of the new arrangement was often nominal, or at least until a serious dispute of inheritance would arise whereby one party might claim the traditional system to enhance his claim. However, at first, the policy seemed to be effective, as most Irish lords accepted it. Conn O'Neill, the Ulster ruler who held pretensions to become high king of Ireland, accepted the title of earl of Tyrone; Murrough O'Brien became earl of Thomond and Baron Inchiquin, and even James Fitzmaurice FitzGerald, a future earl of Desmond, served for a time as court page at Windsor, where he was educated.
Several years before, that other component of the Henrician revolution in government, the religious reformation, also obtained sanction from an Irish parliament. Meeting in 1537, the Act of Supremacy was passed declaring the king to be the supreme head of the Church of Ireland, which all church and state officeholders were required to accept. Probably a majority of the bishops took the oath of supremacy, but most of the faithful remained unaware of the full implications of what was happening. In most places, aside from the Pale, the liturgy and religious practices remained the same, including the Latin liturgy. However, another aspect of Henry's Reformation policy, the dissolution of the monasteries, was not as easily put in motion in Ireland. Opposition was based as much on private or familial interest in monasteries as on religious scruples. Individual families often controlled monasteries, and some abbots held their position by hereditary succession, as many clergy were not particularly observant of church rules of clerical celibacy.
The Reformation in Ireland differed from that in England, and elsewhere. Ireland had not experienced outbursts of heretical thought and agitation, nor were church or clerical abuses a source of popular displeasure, not that they did not exist. This meant that a reformation, if it came about, would have to be something imposed from above and outside rather than based on any domestic, even if minority, demand. But while there was no or minimal zeal for religious change, the opposition to change was not particularly founded on religious enthusiasm, but possibly more on self-interest. To the degree that the Reformation remained superficial and did not really affect everyday life it met little resistance. After all, had not the popes historically been supportive of the assertion of English authority in Ireland as a means of advancing church reform? Was there any difference now, other than that the reform program of the English sought to disconnect the church in Ireland from the papacy?
However much he challenged papal ascendancy, Henry VIII was a very orthodox Catholic in terms of doctrine. It would be during the short reign of his son, Edward VI, still a minor but under the direction of Edward Seymour, the duke of Somerset, that a more substantial church reformation would be extended to Ireland, such as the attempt to put in use the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. The latter provoked the resignation of George Dowdall, the pro-royal supremacy archbishop of Armagh, who equated the new prayer book with the abolition of the Mass. Only a few reforming enthusiasts were supportive, such as the Englishman who was archbishop of Dublin, George Browne, whereas most nobles, whether Old English or Irish, stood in opposition.
In Edward's reign, St. Leger, who had successfully applied, at least superficially, the "Surrender and Regrant" policy, was replaced by Edmund Bellingham, a soldier committed to a military solution for Ireland and supportive of further religious reformation. To the latter end, the Book of Common Prayer was made available for the abolition of "idolatry, papacy and the like." A more Protestant Second Book of Common Prayers in 1552 called for substantial changes in liturgy and rites. Bellingham used his military energies to combat renewed rebellion by two of the Irish chieftains, O'Connor and O'More, both of whom, after fighting in Kildare, Leix, and Offaly, were forced to surrender. Their territories in Offaly and Leix were confiscated, which would allow the introduction of a new approach to the treatment of Ireland: plantation, which meant the occupation and resettlement of land taken from the Irish.
The process of plantation was slowly being readied when Edward died and was succeeded by his half sister, Mary, a Catholic and the daughter of Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The superficiality of the reformation in England, as well as Ireland, was shown by the readiness with which she was accepted. However, for her part, she shrewdly did not undo reformation measures, such as the dissolution of the monasteries, which had created new special interests on the part of those who had gained what had been church properties. But she did allow the prosecution of many radical Protestants, which created a marty-rology for Protestantism in Britain. Within Ireland she was as concerned as any of her predecessors with asserting her authority. She did reappoint St. Leger as deputy, removed the diehard Protestant Browne as archbishop of Dublin, and even allowed the exiled pretender to the earldom of Kildare, Gerald, to return, although the Kildare Geraldines never recovered their old political ascendancy.
However, it was under Mary that the system of plantation was first implemented. Surveys were made of the O'Connor and O'More territories of Offaly and Leix, and a grand jury declared the lands of "traitors" to be forfeited and vested in the Crown. The procedure of plantation, which would be repeated for the next century and a half in Ireland, allowed native owners to retain one-third of the territory with the remainder being made available to settlers, who were to be Englishmen or Englishmen born in Ireland, on specific terms, such as recruiting English servants and providing troops to the deputy. It must be remembered that the displacement of owners involved the aristocratic class and not the ordinary people, who remained as peasant laborers in varying degrees of servitude. The territories of Offaly and Leix so planted were renamed Kings County and Queens County, respectively, in honor of Queen Mary and her husband, Philip, the king of Spain. Even the ousted Irish chieftains were not entirely displaced as landowners. However, the position of being landlord, holding land according to English law, was a far cry from having been a local king, ruling a whole sept, and having a title subject to Brehon rules of succession rather than primogeniture. Naturally, they persisted in intermittent opposition to the new order for decades after.
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