Essay Database

Catastrophic Dimensions This essay's intent is to assess the relationship between the anti-Catholic legislation passed by the Irish parliament of 1613-1615 and the emergence of a distinct national identity in early modern Ireland. For almost four centuries, the royal administration in Ireland had distinguished between the Gaelic Irish populations in the hinterlands of Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster, and the English population in the Pale, that relatively urbanized settlement centered on Dublin, and in the …

…the crown to just that, despite rebuffs in 1494, 1520 and the mid-1530s."(33) What the Old English had not accomplished through persuasion and argument they achieved through constitutional manipulation. In emphasizing Henry's kingly duty towards his subjects in Ireland, they bound the crown to political reform on Old English terms. Kingly duty would become "a much-used weapon in the armoury of persuasives" on which the Old English would rely as conflict with the colonial administration escalated.(34)