Book review: The Life and Career of Archbishop Richard Whately: Ireland, Religion and Reform, The Life and Times of Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin 1823–1852

Abstract

bishops of Dublin and Armagh respectively was extremely limited indeed. It was not the case in the Pale, as Booker mistakenly states, that most beneficed clergy employed curates (p. 118); rather that the holders of the revenues of impropriated benefices, mostly religious houses, commonly employed stipendiary priests rather than vicars to serve the cure of souls – and this reviewer showed several years ago that the overwhelming majority of the stipendiary parish priests of County Louth in the early sixteenth century were Irish, a number of them from clerical families from Ulster. There was, of course, a very small number of Irish clergy who secured middleranking positions in the administration of the Church in the Pale (such as Cormac Roth of Armagh who, again, was long known to have been Irish), but like their secular counterparts they were exceptional. Hence, the status of Irish priests within the Church in the Pale generally mirrored that accorded to the Irish population in the wider community, and if Church played a positive role in interethnic relations within the Pale, the work of Murray, in particular, suggests that it was nothing as positive as that ascribed to it by Booker. This book concludes with the observation that ‘the region [of the Pale] and its English inhabitants were profoundly influenced by Irish culture and Irish people, who in turn were shaped by their time in the colony’ (p. 249). The Irish were disproportionately represented in the poorer segments of society, but an exceptional minority managed to become wealthy despite a raft of anti-Irish legislation intended to copper-fasten the privileges of the colonial community at the expense of the indigenous population. The irony is that when English identity was redefined on the basis of Protestantism during the Tudor reformations, the old colonial community in Ireland found itself victimised alongside the indigenous community by new anti-Irish legislation framed to copperfasten Protestant privilege at the expense of Catholics.