The Great Dublin Summons1585 CE

Dateline

In 1585, Ireland was not remade by one battle or one proclamation. Instead, Sir John Perrot, Elizabeth I’s lord deputy, attempted something more difficult: to draw the island’s competing lordships, towns and provincial elites into a system of crown government. The year’s landmarks were a parliament in Dublin, a far-reaching revenue settlement in Connacht and Thomond, and negotiations in Ulster. Yet each achievement depended on agreement with people whose power did not derive simply from the queen. The year therefore reveals Tudor rule at once ambitious, adaptable and fragile.

A Parliament of Lords and Towns

The Irish parliament met in Dublin on 26 April. Sir Nicholas Walsh, a Waterford lawyer and royal judge, became Speaker of the House of Commons. Its first sitting lasted until 25 May, after which it was prorogued rather than finally dissolved; it would resume in 1586. Perrot hoped that parliament would provide legal force and political consent for his programme. That was particularly important in a kingdom where the crown’s authority remained strongest in Dublin, the Pale, the walled towns and areas garrisoned by royal troops, while much of the country was governed through Gaelic and Gaelicised lords.

The gathering was remarkable for the breadth of the summons and attendance. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled later from Irish learned traditions, preserve an extensive roll of leading participants: the earls of Thomond and Clanricarde, major Connacht dynasts, MacCarthy and O’Sullivan lords from the south-west, and figures from Ulster including Turlough Luineach O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill, Hugh O’Donnell and Cú Chonnacht Maguire. Such a list should not be mistaken for evidence that these men had become obedient officials. Rather, their presence shows that travelling to Dublin, negotiating with the deputy and using parliament could serve their own interests as well as the crown’s.

For Hugh O’Neill, the assembly marked a conspicuous advance. He had exploited the weakening position of his kinsman and rival Turlough Luineach to take control of Dungannon, the symbolic heartland of the O’Neill lordship. At the Dublin parliament Hugh was recognised as earl of Tyrone. The English title gave him standing within the crown’s political order, but it did not settle the question of who would command Tír Eoghain. In Ulster, English peerage, Gaelic inheritance, military following and family alliances overlapped rather than replacing one another.

The parliament also exposed the limitations of government by consent. The crown wished to address the costly burden of cess—the compulsory provisioning and lodging of soldiers—and to secure revenue. MPs and politically influential landowners, especially among the Old English communities of Leinster and Munster, feared that new demands would erode their liberties and property. Poynings’ Law, which required Irish legislation to be approved in advance by the Irish and English privy councils, further narrowed parliament’s freedom of initiative. The session did pass an attainder against the rebel James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglass, but Perrot did not obtain a simple parliamentary endorsement of all he sought.

The Irish annalists also noted absences. They reported that few leading people came from parts of Laois, Offaly and the neighbouring lordships. Their observation is a useful corrective to the imposing attendance list: the Dublin summons reached widely, but it did not command a uniformly willing response. Parliament was a meeting place between political worlds, not proof that they had fused.

Composition in Connacht and Thomond

The most substantial administrative work of 1585 occurred west of the Shannon. In July, commissions associated with Perrot, Sir Richard Bingham, president of Connacht, and other officials pursued the “Composition of Connacht”. Its principle was simple but transformative. A web of older impositions—crown cess, the exactions used to sustain a lord’s household and followers, and obligations of food, lodging and service—was to be converted into specified money payments and legally recorded arrangements.

In practice, it was neither simple nor universally benign. The settlement depended on surveys, inquests, negotiations and written indentures, all of which translated local territories and customary rights into terms recognisable by English administration. The annals record sessions at Ennis in County Clare, then part of the presidency of Connacht as Thomond. They describe an agreed payment of ten shillings to the queen from each inhabited quarter of land, alongside payments due to the earl of Thomond in place of older dues. Church lands and particular liberties were treated separately. The same model was extended across the counties of Galway, Roscommon, Mayo and Sligo.

For cultivators, tenants, herdsmen and small freeholders, the consequences lay in the routines of everyday life. The older system had required communities to feed moving households, military retainers and visiting officials; composition promised a more foreseeable cash obligation. But a fixed charge was only helpful if collectors acted predictably, harvests held up and powerful neighbours honoured the arrangement. The new order also strengthened some major landholders by recording their claims, while narrowing the discretion of others. Sean Mac Conmara, lord in western Clare, was specifically noted as refusing to join the composition. Consent was therefore real but incomplete.

By October, a tenurial survey and agreements for annual crown payments had been secured in much of the province. Perrot’s officials regarded this as a practical success and a possible model for other regions. Bingham, however, soon acquired a fierce reputation for coercion and for favouring the enlargement of royal authority. The tensions were already visible in 1585: Theobald Dillon, a prominent Connacht intermediary, successfully prosecuted Henry Ealand, sheriff of Roscommon, in November for abuse of office. The incident showed that the crown’s new legal machinery could be used against local officials as well as against Irish lords.

Ulster’s Unfinished Settlement

Perrot spent July and August in Ulster, where his government sought to make counties, titles and agreements do the work that armies had repeatedly failed to complete. In August he brokered an arrangement between Hugh O’Neill and Turlough Luineach. Turlough was to retain an acknowledged regional position and income; Hugh’s elevation as earl of Tyrone was accommodated within a temporary division of authority. The settlement aimed to postpone conflict, not to resolve the rival claims permanently. It assumed that Turlough’s declining health and influence would soon remove the problem—an assumption that proved badly premature.

Perrot also advanced the administrative partition of the north. County Monaghan and the short-lived County Coleraine were established in this period, intended to bring territories associated with the MacMahons and the O’Cahans within the map of shires, sheriffs, sessions and common law. On paper, this was a major regional change. On the ground, royal officials still needed local cooperation, soldiers, roads and secure bases. The creation of a county did not itself transfer possession of land, cattle, castles or loyalties.

Events on the Antrim coast made that clear. In January, Sorley Boy MacDonnell returned from Scotland and landed at Cushendun with reinforcements. His campaign initially checked crown-aligned forces before he withdrew across the North Channel. The MacDonnell lordship, rooted in kinship networks linking the Hebrides and north-east Ireland, could not be treated as an isolated Irish disturbance. Perrot had hoped to expel the Scots from the coast; the events of 1585 demonstrated the limits of that aim. Sorley Boy’s position at Dunluce remained a fact with which the Dublin government would have to negotiate.

Religion, Justice and Fear

Religious conformity and political loyalty were increasingly entwined in Tudor administration. In April at Clonmel, the Catholic priest Maurice Mac Ionrachtaigh, commonly rendered Maurice MacKenraghty, was allowed out of prison for a night to celebrate Mass and administer the sacraments in the house of Victor White. The gathering was betrayed and troops surrounded the house. MacKenraghty later surrendered rather than allow White to suffer in his place. He was tried under martial law, treated as a traitor for refusing the oath of supremacy, and executed on 30 April. The episode shows both the persistence of Catholic religious practice in a major Munster town and the severe powers used against it.

A different but equally revealing death occurred on 14 December, when Nicholas Walsh, Church of Ireland bishop of Ossory, was stabbed in his Kilkenny home by James Dullard, whom he had cited before his consistory court for adultery. Walsh had been a fluent Irish speaker and an early promoter of Protestant instruction in Irish; he had helped begin a translation of the New Testament. His murder arose immediately from local ecclesiastical discipline, not from a recorded religious conspiracy. Nevertheless, the loss of a bishop committed to Irish-language evangelisation illustrates how precarious the reformed church’s institutional and cultural reach remained.

Harvest, Succession and a Qualified Peace

The Annals of the Four Masters add a sombre note to the year, stating that there were many feasts and that much of Ireland’s corn was spoiled. The brief entry does not permit a precise reconstruction of weather or local prices, and it should not be inflated into a documented nationwide famine. It does, however, point to the vulnerability of a grain economy in which hospitality, warfare, exactions and a damaged harvest could quickly affect household reserves.

In November Gerald FitzGerald, eleventh earl of Kildare, died in exile in England after five years away from his lands; his son Henry succeeded. His death was another reminder that noble succession was inseparable from royal favour. Across Ireland in 1585, the crown pursued stability through titles, counties, written rents, courts and parliament. Gaelic and Old English elites answered selectively, seeking recognition, advantage and protection while preserving their own followings. The result was not a settled kingdom, but a moment when negotiation briefly appeared as important as conquest—and when the strains beneath that appearance were already plain.