The Question of Obedience and the Formation of Confessional Identity in the Irish Reformation

Abstract

This article sets out to explain religious change in Ireland in terms of the crown’s call for obedience in a well-ordered commonwealth. This means thinking about the problem of religious change in Ireland in terms of the categories of authority and obedience, as opposed to those of confession and choice. There is no doubt that tentative confessional positions had emerged by 1530 with the Augsburg confession. But Henry VIII, like other European rulers and magistrates, did not ask his subjects to choose a new confession. Whilst the king was quite clearly asking his subjects to change their religious position by rejecting papal authority, this was presented as a demand that the king’s subjects obey the prince as the correctly ordained head of the commonwealth; and in setting out such a position Henry emphasized his religious orthodoxy. Significantly, in presenting religious change as a traditional demand for obedience to the prince, this placed severe limits on the conceptual space for dissent and disobedience. This is important, because it suggests that in such a mental world, where orthodoxy and obedience were key, dissent would only become possible if different languages of obedience and orthodoxy became available, which could explain and justify different positions.1 For the Old English community in Ireland this was particularly pertinent. The Old English consisted of those English residents in Ireland, who, since the twelfth century conquest,