Wars

Ireland’s two bloodiest centuries began with Henry VIII’s break with Rome and culminated in the brutal and unforgiving conquest of the entire island. Now, Anglo-Normans became ‘Old English’, faithful to Rome making common cause with the Gaelic-Irish. The ‘New English’ and later, Scottish, settled Leix, Offaly and Munster in the sixteenth century, Ulster and (under Cromwell) everywhere, in the seventeenth. Resistance was strong and sometimes, as in the Nine Years War, 1594–1603, and the Catholic Confederacy of the 1640s during England’s Civil War, almost successful. Ireland was later the sideshow of a larger European conflict, when several nationalities fought in the Williamite wars of the 1690s. There were some Irish conversions to the Church of Ireland (i.e. the official Protestant church), but the continental-trained clergy of the Catholic Reformation defied persecution to keep Catholicism the majority religion. Protestants were a majority only in the north-east. However, the majority ownership of land in the country as a whole moved from Catholic to Protestant. The shiring of Ireland was completed, transport and communication was improved, cities grew, trade remained lively. Irish remained the majority language, and a flowering of Irish-language scholarship preserved old texts and created new ones.