Ireland

Irish Colonisation under Elizabeth.

The English had ruled parts of Ireland from 1171 when English King Henry 2^nd was asked by the Irish leader Dermot MacMurrough  for help to sort out his civil war. The English stayed and had tried half heartedly, on and off to conquer Ireland for the next 400 years as they found their land in France much more agreeable.

Henry 8^th who had no land in France other than Calais, called himself King of Ireland, but only ruled in Dublin and the surrounding area.

Mary who lost Calais extended her father’s territory in Ireland west of Dublin by sending in English settlers to populate the farms in that area. They were called Plantations.

When Elizabeth turned England Protestant she found herself on a small Protestant island surrounded by an angry Catholic Europe to the east and south and a Catholic Ireland to the west. She decided to hugely extend Mary’s plantations with Protestant English land owners to keep Catholic Spanish invaders from using Ireland as a stepping stone to England. This naturally led to riots and attacks on the planted English Farms which eventually involved Spanish forces who came to help their Catholic brothers. In all there were five major riots each lasting years rather than months. Elizabeth sent trusted favourites to quell the riots notably Sir Walter Raleigh  who was given huge estates by Elizabeth to reward him for beating the Irish/Spanish militias sometimes with extreme cruelty. The north of Ireland had never been brought under English control and was the heart of Gaelic strength organised by the Irish families of O’Neil and O’Donnell. Elizabeth’s English colonizers were no match for these Irish, so Elizabeth sent her most flamboyant trusty, the Earl of Essex to quell the riots. He failed and left his army behind in Ireland to fend for themselves. Elizabeth was furious even though the two acted like lovers. Essex was banished from court.

The second time Elizabeth took no chances with flamboyant favourites and sent one of her best army captains, Charles Blount the Lord Mountjoy. This time the crack Irish militia were conquered and their leaders surrendered. Sadly they decided Ireland was no longer their home and left for Catholic France where they disappeared without trace. (The so called “Flight of the Earls”). This left the whole of Ulster leaderless and many farms vacant and Elizabeth certainly did not stand in the way of the many Protestant English and Presbyterian Scots from filling the vacuum. Gaelic Ireland was never the same again as the English and Scots brought in their culture and advanced farming methods.  Elizabeth was the first English monarch to rule the whole of Ireland.

Religion

Elizabeth was born into a country experiencing the birth of a new religion, the Protestant version of Christianity. This was not the first split in the Christian church. Indeed 500 years earlier the Church leaders in Constantinople split from those in Rome creating the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic denominations. In Tudor times they split again. This is called the Reformation and was started by a German priest Martin Luther who rebelled against the corrupt practices of the Christian Church of Western Europe based in Rome which had made the Church immensely rich by selling the idea to the poor parishioners that to get to heaven it was necessary to pay the Church lots of money. Similarly to be forgiven earthly sins more money had to change hands, the so called selling of indulgencies. Protestants thought that bibles and prayer books must be in English rather than Latin and similarly that church services should be in English rather than Latin. They also preached that parishioners should not always ask the priest how to interpret the Bible but that they should learn to read and think through the scriptures for themselves. This encouraged a freedom of thought and action never before achieved which feed down into all ideas notably in science leading to a huge boost to the economy.  The economic benefits were obvious in both England and Holland.

The Protestant Church of Luther and his followers like Calvin and John Knox of Scotland were extreme revolutionaries who demanded a total change to back to basics religion, where priests were poor and gold and silver adorned alters were removed together with such pleasantries as music and singing.

Elizabeth was a religious expert and led the church leaders in England down a middle path, getting rid of dubious concepts which permitted the selling of indulgencies, the elimination of the concepts of limbo, purgatory and private confessions. The removal of dogmatic celibate priests speaking in Latin and introducing the concept of married priest who preached in English and encouraged his flock to read, think and understand. Elizabeth also retained music and singing in church and an alter but without the obvious mass of silver and gold church adornments. This is the Church of England also known as the Episcopal or Anglican Church.

In Elizabethan England this left a sizeable minority of people who quietly and “illegally” remained Catholic or preferred the extreme practices of the Protestants who included the Puritans in England and the Lutherans in Scotland, called Presbyterians. Remember those who split from Rome 500 years previously are known as “Orthodox” very often as Greek or Russian Orthodox. They are very similar to Roman Catholics but claim to have produced the original theological rules of the Christian Church from their headquarters in Constantinople and nearby Nicea. The city of Constantinople the original centre of Christian religious dogma is now called Istanbul following the capture and occupation by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453 when all Christian Churches including the largest ever built, The Church of St Sofia was turned into a mosque.