5 - Reform government and the feudal magnates

Summary

‘Reformation’ rather than ‘damnation’, it has been said, was the fundamental aim of Henrician policy toward the great Irish magnates in the early 1530s. By the promise of patronage and the threat of royal disapproval it had been hoped that the feudal lords could be persuaded to join in the government's campaign to reassert English rule in Ireland by encouraging their allies and their clients to see the advantages of political change. The rebellion of the Kildare Geraldines, as we have seen, profoundly disrupted such hopes. But despite this unexpected setback and its highly disturbing reverberations, the rehabilitation of the Anglo–Irish magnates and their co–option into the work of political reform remained a central objective of successive Tudor governments.

The re–establishment of the house of Kildare and the return of Gerald the eleventh earl to Ireland in 1554 in the company of the tenth earl of Ormond whose minority had also been spent in exile from Ireland gave eloquent testimony to the Tudor concern to restore the magnates to their accustomed place of influence. Both were immediately appointed to the Irish council to serve with the ageing but powerful earl of Desmond and in 1558 they were joined by the second earl of Clanrickard and by the fourteenth earl of Desmond just then elevated to the peerage upon his father's decease.