‘Whatever disorders,’ says Spenser, ‘you see in the Church of England, ye may find in Ireland, and many more: namely gross simony, greedy covetousness, fleshly incontinency, careless sloth, and generally all disordered life in the common clergymen.’ Priests of Irish blood behaved like laymen, neither reading, preaching, nor celebrating the Communion, and ‘christening after the Popish fashion.’ They were diligent only in collecting tithes and dues. When the bishops were Irishmen their government was lax, and very often corrupt. English candidates for livings they rejected whenever they could, and a reason was generally available, since such aspirants were mostly either unlearned, or ‘men of some bad note, for which they have forsaken England.’ In the wilder districts the livings were so miserable that an English minister could scarcely support himself, and so dangerous that no man of peace could venture to reside. Where the benefices were somewhat fat, the incumbents, ‘having the livings of the country offered unto them without pains and without peril, will neither for the same, nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth from their warm nests, to look out into God’s harvest, which is ever ready for the sickle, and all the fields yellow long ago.’ And in the meantime Jesuits and friars came continually from France, Italy, and Spain, ‘by long toil and dangerous travailing thither where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward or riches is to be found, only to draw the people unto the Church of Rome.’ Most of the churches were utterly ruined, and some were ‘so unhandsomely patched and thatched’ as to repel worshippers by their mere ugliness. Carelessness and stinginess were to blame, but the mischief was unwittingly increased by the Puritans, ‘our late too nice fools, who say there is nothing in the seemly form and comely order of the Church.’ Spenser proposed that there should be a strict law strictly enforced against sending young men to Rheims, Douai, Louvain, and such places, ‘whose private persuasions do more hurt than the clergy can do good with their public instructions.’ English ministers, neat churches with proper churchwardens, and efficient schools, might follow. But he was not sanguine, ‘for what good should any English minister do among them by teaching or preaching to them which either cannot understand him or will not hear him.’[437]
Ireland devoted to Rome.
Jesuit schools.
The energy of the Jesuits and friars in Ireland was one sign of a revival in the Church of Rome; no longer the Church of the Borgias or even of the Medici, but of Loyola and Contarini, of St. Carlo Borromeo and St. Vincent de Paul. Fasts were more strictly observed, and it became more and more difficult to secure even occasional and outward conformity to the State Church. In the early years of the Queen’s reign the inhabitants of the towns generally attended service, but the women wearied and were not punished. When the Tyrone war began, even mayors, portreeves, and other local officials had given up their attendance, and most of the children were christened in private houses. The Jesuits had schools in nearly all the towns, and young men resorted in great numbers to foreign seminaries. Priests and friars swarmed everywhere, especially at Waterford, and were sheltered by householders, under whose roofs they sometimes preached quite openly. And the steady influence of these priests was directed to making Ireland dependent on foreign aid. Cornelius Ryan, papal bishop of Killaloe, advised O’Rourke to get some learned Irishman to write to the Pope, begging him to separate Ireland from England for ever and to make Tyrone king. The Jesuit Dominic O’Colan confessed that the designs of Rome and Spain extended even further than this, Philip intending with his army ‘to overrun Ireland, and to make that realm his ladder or bridge into England.’ The questions of religious belief and of civil allegiance are inextricably connected at this period, and it is impossible for us, as it was for Elizabeth, to treat them as really separate.[438]
Waterford Bishop Middleton.
A model dean.
Waterford was by all accounts the greatest resort of priests and friars. Miler Magrath was too busy jobbing to take much notice, and he held the see from 1582 to 1589, and again from 1592 to 1608. But Marmaduke Middleton, who was bishop of Waterford from 1579 to 1582, took his trust seriously, and found life uncomfortable in proportion. The marriage ceremony was scarcely thought necessary. Beads were publicly used, and prayers offered for the dead; nor did Middleton dare, for fear of a tumult, to remove images from the churches. ‘There is,’ he says, ‘no difference between the clergy and the laity here, for they have joined together to prevent her Majesty’s most godly proceedings—both by defacing of the see, which is not annually, at this instant, worth 30l. a year, and all the spiritual living in temporal men’s hands so surely linked that they cannot be redeemed. And the most of the incumbents are little better than wood-kerne.’ Middleton’s life was thought to be in danger, and he was translated to St. David’s. He succeeded in preventing the succession from falling to the dean, David Clere, who had thwarted him in every way, and whom Pelham wished to deprive even of that which he had. The deanery, however, remained with Clere, ‘who was well friended, as none better in this world than the wicked,’ and Magrath had his help in despoiling the church of Waterford.[439]
Cork, Cloyne, and Ross,
Bishop Lyon.