The primatial see of Armagh was vacant at the accession of Elizabeth, and remained so until 1563. Sussex recommended Adam Loftus, a Yorkshireman, who was already in Ireland and distinguished as a preacher. Loftus, who was educated at Cambridge, was the friend of Cartwright, and this may have retarded his promotion for a time. In November, 1561, his preferment was announced, and almost immediately afterwards the news was contradicted on authority. ‘I know not,’ said Sussex, ‘who hath informed that he is not worthy of that place, but if a vehement zeal in religion, good understanding in the Scriptures, doctrines, and other kinds of learning, continual study, good conversation of life, and a bountiful gift of God in utterance, be sufficient to enable him, I undertake I have better ground to enable him than any man of that land or this, of what vocation soever he be, hath to disable him.’ Loftus made the usual professions of unwillingness, and Sussex remarked that the primacy was great in name, but the living very small. He had searched for three years without finding a fit man. The Lord Deputy’s entreaties prevailed, and in October 1561 a congé d’élire was addressed to the Dean and Chapter of Armagh. This is remarkable, because the necessity for such instruments in Ireland had been already abolished by Act of Parliament. The letter was sent down to Armagh, and the Dean replied that no election was possible. The greater part of the Chapter were ‘temporal men and Shane O’Neill’s horsemen.’ The appointment was accordingly made by patent. Perhaps it had been the Queen’s intention to obtain only a permissive dispensation. At all events, the failure of the first attempt at capitular election was enough for her, and she did not repeat the experiment. Loftus was consecrated by Archbishop Curwen in March 1563, and the succession was thus preserved, for Curwen’s authenticity has never been questioned at Rome. At the beginning of 1565 Loftus was elected Dean of St. Patrick’s, and was empowered to hold the deanery along with his archbishopric, from which it must be allowed that he derived little or no profit. It does not appear that he ever saw his cathedral, which was burned by Shane O’Neill in 1566 lest it should shelter the English; and he was ready to resign a dignity which brought him not more than 20l. a year. ‘Of the whole revenues,’ he said, ‘there remaineth nothing but the bare house and fourscore acres of ground at Termonfeckin. Though peace ensue the repressing of this rebel, yet these wastes will not be inhabited, nor the spoils recovered many years hereafter.’ In the following year Loftus was translated to Dublin and forced to resign his deanery, which he did very unwillingly. Curwen, he said, had so impoverished his see that it was worth only 400l. Irish with 1,200 acres of land, and he was ‘minded rather to continue in the poor state’ of nominal primate with St. Patrick’s thrown in. He had, however, admitted that he could do no good in the Northern see, ‘for that altogether it lieth among the Irish.’ Love of money was throughout the bane of Loftus, and went far to neutralise the good effects of his learning and eloquence.[361]
Loftus is removed to Dublin.
Having determined to remove Loftus to Dublin, the Queen seriously thought of making the Dean, Terence Daniel, Primate of All Ireland. He had been thought of in 1564, but was very unfit for the office, and the appointment, which would have been avowedly political, was perhaps prevented by Sidney or Parker. Loftus recommended his friend Cartwright; but Thomas Lancaster, an Englishman who had formerly been Bishop of Kildare, was preferred, and in consideration of the state of his see was allowed to hold other preferment both in England and Ireland.[362]
Papal primates.
But neither Loftus nor Lancaster was acknowledged at Rome, and a Primate not acknowledged at Rome had small chance of reverence from the Irish masses. Donat O’Teige was provided by the Pope, and was at Armagh in the summer of 1561, when Shane O’Neill made his first attempt to burn the cathedral and its garrison of English soldiers. The pretended ‘Papist Primate,’ said Sussex, ‘sung mass with all the friars. After mass the Primate and the friars went thrice about Shane’s men, saying certain prayers, and willed them to go forward, for God was on their side. Whereupon he and all his men made a solemn vow and took their oaths never to turn their faces from the church till they had burned it and all the English churches, and so with a great shout set forward and assaulted the churchyard, where divers of them quickly left their bodies, and the rest, setting on fire the friars’ house and other old houses in another part of the town, ran away.’ We cannot wonder at the difficulty of obtaining canonical election for Loftus. O’Teige died in the following year, and in 1564 Richard Creagh was provided in his room.[363]
Archbishop Creagh. His sufferings.
If martyrdom consists in suffering for one’s opinions, few men have earned the crown better than Archbishop Creagh. He was a Limerick man, the son of a merchant, and himself engaged in trade. A ship in which he was about to sail put to sea while he was engaged in prayer. She foundered with all hands, and this escape made Creagh more serious than ever. He went to Louvain, and afterwards intended to enter the severe Theatine order, which had been founded about the time of his birth; but Pius IV., under pain ‘of cursing,’ obliged him to accept the Irish Primacy. During Queen Mary’s life he had already refused the Archbishopric of Cashel. From Rome he went by way of Augsburg to Antwerp, and thence to Louvain, where, dressed in his archiepiscopal robes, he gave a dinner to the doctors. He then sailed in a ship bound for Ireland, was driven to Dover by a contrary wind, and made his way to Rochester. ‘There,’ says his evidence before the Recorder of London, ‘he found an Irish boy begging, whom he took with him to London, and there lodged at the Three Cups in Broad Street, where he tarried not past three days, and went to Paul’s Church, and there walked but had no talk with any man, and so to Westminster Church to see the monuments there, and from thence came to Westminster Hall the same time that he heard say Bonner was arraigned.’ He made his way to Ireland, landed in his own province, and went to a monastery to hear mass. Immediately afterwards, and within an hour of setting foot on dry land, he was arrested by soldiers and sent to England. He was imprisoned and examined in the Tower, whence he escaped after a few weeks. By some extraordinary negligence, or possibly on purpose, all the doors were left open one morning. Creagh passed out at the main gate and was stopped by the Beefeaters, to whom he represented himself as the servant of Bilson, a Roman Catholic priest who was undergoing an easy imprisonment. He was allowed to go free, and it is not surprising that he should have thought his escape miraculous.[364]
Fate of Creagh.