115 The Penal Laws

Yeah, I think you have to broaden it out even a bit further than that because, you know, Europe as a whole was gripped by religious conflict in the 16th and 17th centuries as a result of the Protestant Reformations in various parts of the continent and, of course, the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

So, you know, starting from Martin Luther and his famous treatise against the papacy and the various reformed churches, the Calvinist churches, and so on springing up around Europe, you have a conflict between the idea of loyalty to the king and loyalty to the religion.

Now, in pre-Reformation Europe, notwithstanding actually there had been persecution of heretics, like famously in the South of France, and persecution of people like Jews and, and Muslims in Spain and stuff, Christianity-wise, they had generally been on the same page, but the Reformation brings up a whole new question of, can you have the subject being a different religion to the king or the queen, the monarch? And according to the political theory of the time, the answer is no, of course you can't, you know, because the monarch is there by divine right.

He's there with the permission of God, if you like, to do God's work, and so the subject has a sacred right, a sacred obligation, rather, to obey the monarch.

You know, there's a series of religious wars in the early 16th century in France, and they break out several times over the course of the century.

There's religious wars in Germany in the 1500s and again in the Thirty Years' War in the 1600s.

The Huguenots, which is the major Protestant sect in France, are driven out of France altogether in the 1690s, so the same decade as the Jacobite-Williamite War in Ireland.

So it's not just an Irish thing.

Now, how does it affect Ireland? The really crucial thing to understand for someone who's coming to this, you know, for the first time is that the intersection between two things.

The Tudors decide to conquer all of Ireland for the first time, so the Tudor kings and queens of England, beginning with Henry VIII and finishing with Elizabeth I.

Now, they do this in part because they have broken with the Pope in Rome.

So Henry VIII wants to get married, the Pope...

He wants to get divorced, and the Pope disagrees, so he breaks with the Pope in Rome, founds his own church.

This puts him vulnerable in continental Europe.

Ireland, the rest of colony, very much half conquered, is dangerous.

So they want to conquer the whole thing for the first time for strategic reasons, but when they do, they have to also impose their new religion on Ireland.

And so this is like, it's a no-brainer in 16th century terms.

Of course they're going to do this, you know? You impose uniformity on your subjects.

It's what everyone does.

Because how can subjects obey you if they're a different religion? You know, they're not obliged to obey you then.

Well, John, we've talked about the 17th century in Ireland before and the Tudor conquest, and one of the points that you made, and may come as a surprise to some people, but you're originally an early modern historian, is that the, the state building and getting the, the Catholic gentry, the Gaelic gentry on board was initially a lot more important to the state than converting the population.

Yeah, absolutely, and this is another very important point to grasp, and it's one reason why the Protestant Reformation didn't take hold.

So the way the English see it in Ireland, and there's loads of treatises about this, including Edmund Spenser, but also, you know, there's various other ones, the Irish are an uncivilized people.

Now, th- they are culturally inferior.

They don't quite say that they're racially inferior, 'cause the idea is that you can make them into Englishmen.