Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland by Mark A. Hutchinson (review)

The failure of the Reformation in Ireland cemented the supremacy of the Protestant ruling elite, who rejected conciliatory policies in favour of coercive strategies to enforce law and order. Mark Hutchinson finds that the Reformation also provided the catalyst for new ways of thinking about political relationships. Making use of the vast Irish State Paper collections, alongside published works, Hutchinson presents compelling evidence that the Irish experience enabled the English to articulate an absolutist state theory for the first time.

Taking Patrick Collinson’s ‘monarchical republic’ as a starting point, Hutchinson explores the reasons why the monarchical republic failed to take hold in Ireland and defines the ideological conditions that led to the triumph of absolutism. Emerging ideologies were governed by the interplay between theology and political theory as the English abandoned the reformist government of the earlier Tudors in favour of a more coercive and punitive regime.

The Protestant concept of grace is central to this book. God’s word operated through grace to reform a person’s conscience. Only then would they know God and pursue a Godly life. Grace-based friendship implied internal bonds of unity as the godly community worked together in the common interest. For this reason, liberty and the right to political participation depended upon the presence of grace. Protestant observers in Ireland linked rebellion and disunity to a lack of preaching and, by extension, an absence of grace. Civil society was infeasible while the population lacked legitimate spiritual guidance. Reformers struggled to pass the necessary religious legislation and the Old English (descended from medieval settlers) and Gaelic Irish refused to be drawn into the Godly community.

As the English lamented the failure of reform policy in Ireland, they borrowed from English and continental theory to construct an external model for obedience: the state. This state concept was an altered version of Jean Bodin’s indivisible sovereignty. In Ireland, authority could not rest with the Queen, who was absent, or with the polity, which was thought to be corrupt. The solution was to invest absolute authority in the institutions of government.

In what Hutchinson purports to be the first open claim to absolutism in Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney argued that he could collect levies from the Pale community as such policy was his prerogative as lord deputy. The lord deputy’s insistence on prerogative in matters of policy denoted a shift in thinking about the nature of imperium in Ireland. The idea of absolute sovereign authority detached from the queen and polity and invested in the lord deputy and his council credibly points to a nascent absolutism.

Why did Protestant reformers in Ireland reject the monarchical republic? Hutchinson claims that the answer lies in the religious dimensions of such a concept. As the Old English pressed for a monarchical republic, their Protestant counterparts denied the existence of an Irish mixed polity. Considerations of grace and corrupted conscience led the English to reject Irish claims to liberty. Instead they proposed a statist solution that would constrain Catholic access to government. As Catholics were excluded from political life via legal and extra-legal means, the English formalised political relationships through the apparatus of the state. Feudal language of lordly fidelity was replaced by the authority of state institutions as embodied in the person of the lord deputy. The atomisation of Irish society occurred as tax was regularised and land was converted into freehold, thus defining the relationship between the individual and the state.

Finally, Hutchinson revisits some well-known texts relating to Ireland and considers their contributions to statist thought. Amid the proliferation of Edmund Spenser scholarship, Hutchinson’s reading of A View of the Present State of Ireland offers a new interpretation. He considers the View to be a potentially important piece of early statist theory as its author gave voice to familiar concerns about corrupted Irish consciences...