Of nearly equal importance with Creagh was Redmond O’Gallagher, the titular Bishop of Derry, who befriended Captain Cuellar, when he was cast away. O’Gallagher was one of the three Irish bishops who attended the Council of Trent. He had faculty to exercise jurisdiction in the whole province of Armagh during the frequent absences of Archbishop Creagh, and perhaps of his successor, MacGauran, and was busy ‘throughout all Ulster, consecrating churches, ordaining priests, confirming children, and giving all manner of dispensations, riding with pomp and company from place to place as it was accustomed in Queen Mary’s days.’ He was killed in a skirmish or foray in 1601. Cornelius O’Devany, titular bishop of Down and Connor, is revered in Ireland as a martyr, but his death did not take place till 1612, when he had been thirty years bishop. It was reported in 1592 that ‘Ulster contained nineteen monasteries, in which the friars and monks remained, using their habit and service as in Rome itself.’[442]
Protestant primates.
Lancaster.
Primate Long.
Primate Garvey.
Primate Henry Ussher.
From the translation of Loftus in 1567 to the end of the reign, there were four legal primates. The Cathedral of Armagh had been wrecked by Shane O’Neill, and the ruins of the city could scarcely be held even by a garrison, so that the archbishops generally lived at Termonfeckin. Primate Lancaster was anxious to found a grammar-school in the neighbouring town of Drogheda, and offered to leave ‘out of my transitory trifles 600l. for the performance of the same;’ but he seems to have died without carrying out this design, and his successor, Dr. Long, is better remembered for having wasted the property of his see than for any benefit to it. But Long was not a pluralist like his predecessor, and it may be urged in extenuation that he died 1,000l. in debt. He was succeeded by John Garvey, a Kilkenny man with an Oxford degree, who spoke Irish and who had earned a good name as Bishop of Kilmore. Garvey complained that Long had reduced the value of the see to 120l. a year by granting leases for ninety-nine years, that his houses at Termonfeckin and Drogheda were in ruins, and that three years’ income would scarcely suffice to put a roof over his head. Garvey died in 1595, and his successor, Henry Ussher, is most famous as one of the founders of Trinity College. The restoration of the cathedral and the provision of a residence at Armagh were reserved for Primate Hampton.[443]
Primate Long’s account of the Church, 1585.
Primate Long has left a lamentable account of the Church in Perrott’s time, while giving that Deputy full credit for doing his best. ‘But why,’ he says, ‘should I name it a Church? whereas there is scant a show of any congregation of the godly, either care of material or mystical temple, in which men are brought to that pass, as taking away their shape, they are worse than horse and mule that have no understanding... becometh your honour to remember that subjects have souls as well as bodies, and how grievous it is to the Spirit of God to have them governed in body and neglected in soul.... Oh, that your careful eyes did behold the abominations which, like impudent dogs, they are not ashamed before the King of Kings to commit, the smell whereof so annoyeth the heavens that I fear the Lord sitting there laugheth our counsel to scorn, which savours so much of our own wits without the true fear of him which is the beginning of wisdom... the clergy are like the people; nay, they have made the people like them monstrum horrendum informe ingens cui lumen ademptum. Your godly Parliament in England hath somewhat, though not sufficiently, bridled the court of faculties, the corruption of the clergy; but in this poor island it sendeth old and young, clergy and laity, in a wild gallop to the devil.... Many souls daily perish whose cure are committed to boys and to open wolves.... Is it possible to look for civil peace where there is no peace in conscience? Pitiful it is, and will be answered before the Highest, to suffer his garden to waste wild for lack of trimming, and then to pull up his plants, that might fructify, by the root, by palpable ignorance to make traitors, and then by sword and law to shed their blood, who for lack of better teaching could never do better.’ A few months later Long had the satisfaction of announcing that Owen O’Hart, Bishop of Achonry by papal provision, and one of those who had attended the Council of Trent, had resigned his see, ‘prostrating himself before her Majesty whom he beforehand had agreed to curse, and thoroughly persuaded that the man of sin sitteth in Rome under pretence of the seat of God.’ But O’Hart continued to act as bishop, paying hush money to his ostensible Protestant successor, and forming one of the seven who in 1587 promulgated the Tridentine decrees throughout Ulster. ‘It is a hard thing,’ says Long, ‘to be thought of, that the land is not able to afford of the birth of the land forty Christians which have the taste of the true service of God; and how then can they be true-hearted to her Majesty when they are severed from her.’ Lurking papists were bolder than they had been, and threatened the State; and it would be ‘too late to shut the stable door when the horse is stolen.’ Long is sometimes edifying and always forcible, but Ussher accused him of alienating the see-lands, and of making a seal which enabled him to do so without capitular consent.[444]