Gentlemen,
In the March number of your valuable periodical there was a most interesting paper on the See of Down and Connor. I apprehend, however, it contained a few slight mistakes, which I would have pointed out, but hoped that some person more intimately conversant with the subject would have done so in your April number. Such not having been the case, I shall endeavour to do so. However, before entering on these matters, I beg to say, in illustration of your learned contributor's notes, that the “Ecclesia de Rathlunga”, of which Bishop Liddell had been rector, is now called Raloo, and lies between Larne and Carrickfergus, in the county of Antrim (see Reeves, p. 52); that Lesmoghan, of which Bishop Killen had been pastor, still bears the same name, forming a sub-denomination of the parish of Ballykinler, county Down (Ib., p. 28); that Arwhyn, of which John of Baliconingham (now Coniamstown, near Downpatrick) was rector, is now the mensal parish of Ardquin, in the barony of Ardes, county Down (Ib., p. 20); and that Camelyn, of which Bishop Dongan was pastor, is now called Crumlin, being united to the parish of Glenavy, near Lough Neagh, county Antrim (Ib., p. 4). Returning from this digression, it is quite plain from the Bull dated June, 1461, given by De Burgo (Hib. Dom., p. 474), and cited by your contributor, p. 267, appointing Richard Wolsey to the See of Down, that Wolsey was not the immediate successor of Bishop John, who died in 1450. It expressly states, as mentioned in the article, that the See was vacant by the death of Thomas, last bishop of the canonically united dioceses of Down and Connor, repeating the same name in the body of the Bull. How this is to be reconciled with the statement that Wolsey was John's successor, I cannot say; but it follows, on the principle laid down by your contributor in ignoring John Logan, placed by Ware between William, bishop from 1365 to 1368, and Richard Calf II., 1369, that we must have a Bishop Thomas between John and Richard Wolsey. Dr. Reeves (Eccl. Ant. Down, etc., p. 257), on the authority of this very Bull, has accordingly done so, marking him as succeeding in 1450, and [pg 386] the see vacant in 1451. He conjectures him to have been Thomas Pollard, who in 1450 was appointed custose of the temporalities. Dr. Cotton (vol. iii. p. 201) adopts this view without hesitation, and it would appear by a complaint of the beforementioned Bishop John, shortly after the union of Down and Connor in 1441, that even then Pollard claimed to have an apostolical provision for the See of Down (Primate Mey's Registry, cited by Reeves, p. 37; see also Harris's Ware, p. 203, where it is likewise mentioned that Pollard contested the See of Down with John of Connor, both carrying themselves as bishops thereof, Harris adding that it was thought Pollard was supported by the primate, and that it was only in 1449 Pollard lost his cause, just two years before Wolsey's appointment). It may be asked, had he a reversionary provision before the union was canonically effected? If not, is Thomas a misprint for John in the Bull? as we are aware that there are many typographical errors in the Hib. Dom.—for instance, as to John O'Molony, Bishop of Killaloe, who died circ. 1650, is in several places called Thomas.
The next bishop respecting whom I wish to make some observations is Eugene or Owen Magenis, appointed in 1541, and though I am not disposed to deal uncharitably with him, I have no doubt he was a “temporiser”, though he may have been secretly “orthodox”. Dr. M'Carthy (Dr. Kelly's Essays, p. 427), and Brennan, and Walsh, in their ecclesiastical histories of Ireland are compelled to come to the same conclusion; and upon the whole of his career I candidly confess I don't know what other result they could arrive at. I ground nothing on his being present, if he were present, at Queen Elizabeth's first parliament in 1560, which passed the Act of Uniformity, and required the oath of supremacy to be taken by all ecclesiastics; for even if he had been present, there is no documentary evidence extant showing how those in attendance voted, and those acquainted with Irish history know on the authority of Archdeacon Lynch that these acts were hurriedly and surreptitiously passed on a day when they were not expected to be brought forward, and in a thin packed house. But it appears, so far as his public acts are reported, that he submitted in matters of ecclesiastical discipline to all the rapid changes and schisms which the fertile imaginations of the pseudo-reformers introduced during the Tudor reigns. He surrendered his bulls to Henry VIII., obtained from Paul, “Bishop of Rome”, not “His Holiness”; took out pardon for accepting them, with a new grant of the see, with the archdeaconry and confirmation of the parishes of Aghaderg and Anaghlone, parishes to which he had been promoted by the Primate in 1526 and 1528. It is an oversight to suppose that about 1541 and 1543 the [pg 387] northern chieftains who submitted to Henry VIII. were exempted from all pressure in matter of religion. Cox (Aug. Hib., vol. i. p. 272) writes that the king about that time caused all the Irish who submitted to him to renounce the “Pope's usurpations, and to own the king's supremacy by indenture”, among others, stating that O'Neill did so, January, 1542, all the indentures being registered in the Red Book of the Exchequer. The articles of Con O'Neill's submission are printed in vol. iii. part iii. p. 353, of the State Papers of Henry VIII.; and by the second article, he expressly renounces obedience to the Roman Pontiff and his usurped authority, and acknowledges the king to be the supreme head of the Church in England and Ireland, immediately under Christ. Manus O'Donnell, 3rd June the preceding year, in his letter styles the king on Earth immediately under Christ supreme head of the Church of England—(Ib., p. 217). M'Donell, captain of the galloglasses, goes further, and promises to annihilate and relinquish the usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome; and his adherents and abettors will expel, extirp, and diminish, etc.—(Ib., p. 383). Redmond MacMahon, captain of the Farney, 30th December, 1543, also renounces the usurped authority of the Roman Pontiff—(Shirley's Farney, p. 40). Even in the reign of Queen Mary, we find Owen Macgenis, of Iveagh, chief of his sept and captain of his country, binding himself not to admit any provisions from Rome, but oppose them all he could—(Cox, i. p. 299). No doubt these indentures were extorted by necessity from these chiefs, who scoffed at the idea that Henry had any religion or was the head of any church, and kept the articles just as long as they could not help it. Dr. M'Carthy, I presume on the ground of Bishop Magenis suing out pardon in Queen Mary's reign, considers he afterwards “repented”, being made a privy councillor and governor of his country; but then we have two similar acts of repentance in Elizabeth's reign, for he took out the royal pardon, 1st May and 25th October in her first year, thus atoning for his folly in her predecessor's. If he lived till 1564, as Dr. Moran (Archbishops of Dublin) supposes—though I consider he was dead in 1563, from the queen's letter, dated 6th January, 1564, naming James M'Caghwell to the see, then “destitute of an incumbent”, and also from the fact of Shane O'Neill applying for the see for his brother, 1563-4—then, knowing that the greater parts of the counties of Down and Antrim were, in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, completely under subjection to the English, and coupling this with the solicitation of the royal pardons, the least that can be said is, that Bishop Magenis acquiesced in or tacitly submitted to the ecclesiastical changes enacted in the parliament of 1560, not [pg 388] forgetting that about the same time Andrew Brereton, governor of Lecale (called Britton by Anthony Bruodin, in Dr. Moran's Archbishops of Dublin, p. 142), mercilessly strangled John O'Lochran and two other Franciscan friars, in Downpatrick. But I have reserved for the last the conduct of Bishop Magenis in the reign of Edward VI. On the 2nd of February, 1552-3, he assisted George Brown of Dublin in consecrating Hugh Goodacre to be Archbishop of Armagh, and John Bale to be Bishop of Ossory, according to a new-fangled form annexed to the second Book of Common Prayer of Edward VI., which was not even authorised by act of parliament, nor by any order of the king (Mant, vol. i. p. 219)—as an Erastian church would require—which was opposed by the Catholic clergy at the time, and afterwards, in the reign of Queen Mary, condemned by all the Catholic bishops of England as invalid, defective in matter, form, and intention. And who was this John Bale whom Bishop Magenis assisted in consecrating by this vitiated rite? He, according to Pits, as quoted by Harris (Ware's Bishops, p. 417), was “an English Heretick, an apostate Carmelite, and a married priest. This poor wretch, except his calumnies against men and his blasphemies against God and his saints, hath nothing in him worthy to be taken notice of”. Condemned by his brother Protestants, Vossius, Wharton, etc., for his acrimony and falsehood, it is little wonder the Catholics, on the death of Edward VI., chased him from Kilkenny. Had his “King Johan: a play, in two parts”, published by the Camden Society in 1838, been known in his lifetime, in which drama he apotheosises that merciless tyrant, alike despicable, cruel, and infamous, the murderer of his own nephew, as a great reformer, “the model of every virtue, human and divine”, it would have completed his infamy and disgrace. No earthly fears should have prevailed on an orthodox bishop to pretend to consecrate a man whose life was such a disgrace to religion. I do not lay much stress on the formal words of the Bull appointing Myler Magrath to these sees, 12th October, 1565, vacant per obitum Eugenii Magnissae: it simply shows he was not deposed, and it may have been with him as with his successor, that hopes were entertained for some years that he would abandon his state conformity, which I trust was the case. The astute and wily ministers of Elizabeth at this early date did not compel apostacy, nor seek for purity of morals; though apostates themselves, all they required was outward conformity, that the elect should take investiture from the crown. They bided their time.
It is questionable but that Sir James Ware knew Bishop Dougan had been Bishop of Soder and Man, for in one of his MSS. in Trinity College Library, cited by Reeves, p. 177, he [pg 389] writes of John Duncan, Archdeacon of Down, in 1373, “Factus Episcopus Sodorensis sive Insular. Manniar, 1374”; the different spelling of the name, and the great age Dr. Dougan must have attained before his elevation to Down in 1394 (living till 1412), may have induced him to doubt the identity.
I am delighted to learn that we are to have these valuable papers with others on the succession of the Irish sees, published in a separate volume; and were I permitted to offer a suggestion, I would recommend that the succession should be brought down to the period of the Confederation of Kilkenny, when all the sees, with the exception of Derry and Dromore, were, I think, full. Enriched with a few biographical notes, such a work would be a valuable accession to Irish ecclesiastical history, and would, besides, utterly shatter the vain and fanciful theories of Mant, Palmer, etc., as to apostolical succession through the puritanical Adam Loftus, the apostate rector of Outwell, in Norfolk, to which he had been appointed in 1556—(Cotton's Fasti, v. p. 197).
I omitted to ask if it can be explained why Myler Magrath, in his letter of 24th June, 1592, given in extenso by Father Meehan in Duffy's Hib. Magazine, March, 1864, calls, “Darby Creagh”, Bishop of Cloyne, his cousin. Dermot or Darby Creagh, or Gragh, or MacGragh, or M'Grath—for by these various names he is called, is stated in the paper on Cork and Cloyne in your last number to be a native of Munster; whereas Myler Magrath was eldest son of Donogh, otherwise Gillagmagna Magrath, of Termon Magrath, county of Fermanagh, of which the family had been erenachs. He married Anne O'Meara, by whom he had five sons—Terence, alias Tirlagh, Redmond, Barnaby, alias Brien, Mark, and James, besides two daughters, Cecily or Sheelagh, married to Philip O'Dwyer, and Eliza or Ellis, married to Sir John Bowen. How came the relationship? I don't understand why Myler is named as the foster-brother of the great Shane O'Neill. The latter was fostered by the O'Donnellys of Tyrone, and hence frequently styled Shane Donnellagh. Terence Donnelly, alias Daniel, Dean of Armagh, was his foster-brother.
J. W. H.
April 8, 1865.
II.
To the Editors of the Record.