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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
‘Ireland was the only country where the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the head of state.’ Why was this? Obviously, the English Government's neglect of education and the Catholic clergy's awareness of its importance was one reason. Obviously, too, the Counter-Reformation got under way in Ireland before the Reformation made a religious impact. Again, the quality of the reformed clergy sent to Ireland was poor and they made little effort to learn Gaelic or to translate the scriptures into the national language until very late in the century. But perhaps most important of all is the fact that in Gaelic Ireland the Reformation was inextricably linked with the expropriation of lands and the abolition of traditional rights and customs. Hence, defence of one's land and of one's religion became so intertwined as to be almost inseparable; and this, I suspect, rather than any appreciation of theological distinctions, was decisive. A number of the clergy of the Counter-Reformation, most of them educated in the Irish colleges on the Continent, were at pains not only to underline the ‘heresies’ in the new teaching and to instruct the people in the spirit of Tridentine Catholicism, but also to link the struggle against the ‘gall’, the English conqueror, with the European religious struggle.
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6 Ibid.
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39 O'Doherty (2), p. 2.
40 When a change to Salamanca was mooted in 1636, one of the objections was that the conduct of the English students might deteriorate ‘through the example of and dealings with the other colleges, especially the Irish’, since there might be a danger of ‘introducing into the seminary the freedom that these have, which would be the cause of many disturbances’: C.R.S. 29, pp. 234ff.
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56 Archivum Hibernicum, 2, p. 78.
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65 Ibid.
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67 Ibid, f. 207v.
68 Irish Provincial Archives, MS. A, Archer to Aquaviva, 10 August 1598.
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71 Ibid., p. 308.
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80 Ibid., p. 193.
81 Ibid.
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85 Ibid., p. 701.
